A Lack of Chestnuts

Although it's now a tiny, hole-in-the-wall business selling a plethora of supplements and natural body care products in a strip mall that was erected in my hometown not ten years ago, Apple Health Foods was a health food restaurant in the latter half of the 1970s. Of course, this is the San Francisco Bay Area I'm talking about, but still, it was groundbreaking in its way. A health food restaurant? Years before the 1980s health-food trends of "lowfat" and "lite" and sprouts/granola/yogurt? And not in S.F. or Berkeley, but in a vague suburb of the former?

My mom worked at Apple for a period of time after she and my father came to the U.S. from Korea in the summer of 1976, and she still talks about how they made the best baked brown rice there. Also, she made her own granola. Indeed. I'll refrain from speculating as to whether or not the woman shaved her armpits during this freewheelin' phase of her life.

It's been years seen I've seen the only piece of known visual evidence of my mom's stint in this restaurant, but I can still see the photo clearly in my head:

The picture is of a wall with a huge window cut into it. By the window is some signage - the writing is indistinguishable but it's patently advertising the day's special or something of that nature. The sill of this window has been converted into a counter, and behind this counter, framed by the window, is my mother. She's about my age - mid-twenties - and she's as amazingly pretty as she is today, though perhaps a little skinnier, and with about ten less wrinkles. Her hair is swept back by a red kerchief, and she's looking over her shoulder and captured in mid-laugh, smiling not at the camera but at someone beyond the window whom we are not privileged to see. She is holding a wooden spoon like a wand, but the food she was enchanting before being so rudely distracted sits below the sill and is not visible. Perhaps it is granola.

This photo is somewhere in a rarely-opened box or album, and I long to rediscover it. After a long dormancy, it recently rose from the neural depths of stored data while I was attempting a mental catalogue of every single memory I have... Every single memory I have of preschool. I was in the middle of a long, post-midnight drive home and was doing my best to keep my mind alert and my eyes open. Thinking back on it now, caffeine would have been the obvious choice, but my idea did its job admirably and I made it home reasonably awake.

One of the more vivid preschool memories I have, and the one which brought to mind the photo, is of the cake my mother made for me and the entire school when I turned four years old. She made it in a huge, 15"x10"x2" baking dish, and the cake was filled with carrots, zucchini, walnuts, and raisins. My mother's gift to me as I turned four was the gift of Sweet Roughage. This slab was more a soft, moist bread than a cake, and I remember being annoyed every time I bit into a chunk of walnut. Still, I remember thinking it was damn tasty overall, even though that was probably because my mother did make one concession to unhealthiness with a satisfyingly thick layer of white frosting, the requisite "Happy Birthday!" message drawn out in a dark, forest green. And while I can't say for sure what my mom was wearing that day without looking at actual pictures of the event (except that I think dark blue was involved), what I do remember is the feeling of security and satiation, and the warm, comfy feeling of the fabric of my mom's sweater as she stood protectively behind me, handing out cake pieces to the other kids and making sure everyone had enough milk or juice.

So it was a fairly hard lump to swallow when my mom contacted me from Korea to say that she'd have to extend her stay and would be unable to come home for Thanksgiving this year because she was recovering from an impromptu operation she had done on her arm. I was glad the procedure turned out fine and would've been the first to demand that she get well before coming home, but I won't deny being disappointed. More than Christmas, Thanksgiving is the holiday that gets me sentimental. Partly because it doesn't come with all the consumeristic baggage and pseudo-religious mawdling; partly because the day is simply and unpretentiously about getting people around the table and celebrating your guts out; but mainly because Thanksgiving is the time I go to see my mother for the sole purpose of being taken care of. Most of the other times I go to see her, I'm bringing her gifts and buying her dinner and things, be it Christmas, Mother's Day, or her birthday. On Thanksgiving, I simply spend time with her, cook with her, let go, and return to that feeling of security, of being nurtured.

This is the only reason why, as much as I try to minimize contact with my biological father, I made it a point to drive back to my hometown on Thanksgiving and prepare a full-course dinner for David, my little brother. Although he stays with my father when school is in session, David lives with my mother during every break and on the holidays, and it's for the same reason I go to see her on Thanksgiving: good food aside, neither of us can expect our father to emit the type of warmth and caring our mother shamelessly oozes from every pore. As much as I didn't want to celebrate Thanksgiving with my father, the thought of my brother celebrating with him alone and eating Dad-endorsed turkey dinners from Boston Market or Safeway galled me even more, so I gathered up a pile of groceries and things from my pantry and drove down early on the morning of Thanksgiving.

That day I was having way too much trouble finding chestnuts to use in the stuffing, and I was getting pissed. In my biased opinion, my mother's chestnut stuffing is one of the best things about Thanksgiving, and to be unable to make it for my brother was irking me. It was irking me as much as the fact that no one seemed to have chestnuts, much less think about carrying them, and that half the clerks I flagged down had no idea what they even were. It was almost like a year or two back when my mother and I had to drive to four different places before finally finding a sorry-looking pile of chestnuts in a "gourmet" store - and what made them sorry was not their quality, but the sight of a full and bustling store where no one but us was interested in the things. We could have easily found a bushel of chestnuts at the Korean grocery, but those were the wrong variety: too grainy and sweet, without the smooth, buttery/nutty quality you'd want in chestnuts being roasted for a good stuffing.

At a loss and thoroughly disgusted with the human condition, I gave up and improvised, using toasted pecans as a substitute and hoping that David wouldn't accuse me of heresy under his breath. Yet although I began cooking without the most positive frame of mind, I realized that I was actually glad that I sucked at finding chestnuts, and it wasn't just because it meant less cooking and manual labor. Nor was it a case of sour grapes; instead, it was a case of things being right the way they were.

It was appropriate that I couldn't make my mom's dish for my brother, because my mom wasn't here to wave her wand over it anyway. What was a better way for David and I to honor her absence this year, to remember her and think of her, than to omit one of the many Little Things we missed about her on this particular day? Like the fact that the empty bench in the backyard is meant solely for your dad in case he wants to take his beer outside; like the empty seat your child stubbornly reserves for an imaginary friend; the lack of chestnuts was a better salute to our mother than any facsimile of her culinary love that I could have come up with in denial. We were thinking about her on the other side of the Pacific, she was thinking about us, and the three of us were missing being with each other. It was enough.

My stuffing turned out great. David repeatedly proclaimed that it was the best part of the huge, multi-course meal. And days after the fact, while trying to catalogue my memories of preschool, I realized that the huge dish I'd baked it in was the same one my mother had used to make my birthday cake the year I turned four. Not to worry: all remnants of that old thing were probably scrubbed off the dish by my mother as soon as she brought me home from school that day. Though I'd be surprised if other, subtler things haven't left indelible marks.

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