Let's talk potatoes

Mother pointed her index finger at me.

“No, Jim,” she said, her eyebrows arching downward like the grille on the ’59 Buick Electra. “You need to chop the carrots finely, here, like this – see how it’s supposed to be done. Look, I’ll do this. You mash the potatoes.”

I walked to the other side of the kitchen. Mike was sautéing the ground beef and onions – oh, that smelled savory tangy. Why’d he get the fun job? I was stuck with vegetables while Mother lorded over all of us.

Dad busied himself with setting the table, and when he was done, he turned on Fox News. Their favorite, but of course – they lived in South Carolina. It would be their favorite. R.W.N., the Right Wing News channel.

“Jim!” Mother said, coming over to me and the potato masher. “You’re going to get lumpy potatoes. Mash in smooth circles, not all choppy like that! Here, let me show you the right way to do it. See? Okay, good.”

That evening, after the shepherd’s pie had been consumed, I looked around the table at our family and the neighbors we’d invited. There were John and Mark, Joni, my parents, and Mike’s mother Judy. We sat all the older people at the dining room table. We younger ones – if you thought 50 was young – Mike and I sat around the nearby kitchen table with Mike’s sister and her husband.

And now, five years later, I look back at that table in my mind, a snapshot of time in these older people’s lives. Who’d have thought, in these five years, that John and Mark would both die, Mother would be disabled by a cerebral hemorrhage, Dad would be far gone into the cloud of Alzheimer’s, and Joni would become wheelchair-bound by her degenerative back ailments? Oh, to have caught that memory in a bottle, and to bring it into the present, whenever I wanted to feel the life around that table …

Later that evening from five years ago, I scrubbed the remnants of our shepherd’s pie from the serving pan. At the time, I was glad the evening had come to an end.