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of cc&d magazine.
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Sal always got stuck with the unimportant jobs. His latest job meant gathering all the old pots, pans, and other dented aluminum items in his grandmother’s pantry.
At thirteen, Sal’s parents felt he was mature enough to help “clean out” his grandmother’s apartment. It was over due. “Nanni” had been buried almost three weeks ago. Sal, however, was not old enough to go to his Sicilian grandmother’s wake or funeral. He stayed with an older cousin looking after the kids who were too “little” to see a dead body. Yet Sal was old enough to help his parents clean out the apartment that was like his second home.
Whenever Sal was sick, his parents dropped him off at his grandmother’s. He would stay most of the day until his parents picked him up after work. Until then, Sal entertained himself with pens, pencils, and paper (or sometimes walls) to write on. When he got older, the latest battery-operated toy or a sophisticated board game kept him amused. Yet Sal didn’t always need toys or games to engage his imagination. Simple pots and pans like he now put on the floor could engage him for hours. Pots that simmered sauce in, became helmets. The large aluminum lids that covered big pans became shields. The large wooden stirring fork that stirred anything being boiled, became a weapon.
But as Sal gathered fifty or more year old dented and wobbly tins around him, he remembered the Sicilian Sunday dinners his grandmother cooked for his family. After Sal brought one pot up to his face, he could smell the pepper and olives that simmered in it: the ingredients for his grandmother’s special chicken recipe.
But once Sal closed his eyes, he could taste the chicken that he rubbed the olives against for extra flavor. Soon, years of similar smells and tastes returned as he un-shelved the pantry. In a saucepan that still had flecks of faded red paint, Sal smelled his grandmother’s sauce, distinct for the way it had a sprig of clove in it. This tiny mandrake-shaped spice puckered the edge of your tongue if it was your misfortune to taste it in your forkful of spaghetti! In the kettle-drum size pot (well, almost!) Sal could smell and even taste the starchy mushiness of spaghetti or ziti softening beneath a bubbly, foamy, salty froth. Even in the aluminum, cowbell shaped cheese grater with the barbed wire like holes, Sal could still smell and mentally taste the tangy and salty Parmesan cheese. This was Nanni’s kitchen. Cheese did not come in a jar. It came in a butter colored block. And you only got cheese from it once you scraped it against the grater. It could be hell on your knuckles when they accidentally scraped against its barbed metal, but at four or five years old, Sal felt grown up grating his own cheese.
“What the hell ya doing! Sitting on the floor like some kid!”
It was Sal’s father; on edge since his mother died a few weeks ago.
“You’re supposed to be throwing that stuff in bags, not playing with it like a kid!”
“You don’t want any of it wrapped up?” Sal asked.
“Wrap it up? What the hell’s the matter with you.”
“To take home,” Sal said. “We’re taking Nanni’s pots and pans home, right?”
“Take it home?” his father asked incredulously. “We can’t even take this junk to the Goodwill!”
His father flicked open a green plastic garbage bag.
“Just put it all in here,” his father ordered. “And when you need another bag, lemme know. We waited too long to clean out this junk, and Christ her landlord...”
His father’s worry about the landlord faded as he left the pantry. Even if it didn’t, Sal was no longer hearing his father. Sal now heard the voice of his dead grandmother; a voice that knew little English. What English she could speak, however, had a musical sassy quality, especially when telling secrets.
“My granda-motha,” she one day told him, “she smoka peep-a.”
“Peep-a?” Sal asked, not understanding.
“Peep-a,” his grandmother said as she pulled out a corncob pipe that she stuffed with tobacco, and before she lit it--
“Shhh,” she warned Sal the same time she welcomed him into her secret. “Shh!”
And luckily, no one found a pipe in the apartment, which got carted away in plastic bags just like the ones Sal filled and tied up in the pantry.
