orange zest and port wine

Only two things that money can’t buy, and that’s true love and homegrown tomatoes.  That song played at my grandfather’s funeral.  Well, not actually the funeral, it was after the Roman Catholic service.  It was the first time I had ever seen a dead body with the skin all waxy and sunken into the casket like a puddle of body with not much left to hold it up.  And some people even touched him.  All I could manage was to kneel like I was praying (I didn’t know how) and whisper goodbye to the body that was supposed to be my grandfather’s.  

It was a big day of big things.  It was the day my aunt shouted from the front porch that she never wanted kids.  She has two now.  It was the day I met most of my extended family.  Some I haven’t seen since, only faces in my memory.  It was the day my dad picked up the guitar that Dave Hershberger brought.  He’s dead now too, a sudden heart attack, younger than my dad.  And he played “Homegrown Tomatoes” by Guy Clark.  The song played the other day and it tastes like Homer on that weekend in May when the grass is sweet and the flowers in bloom.

Taducce taught me about homegrown tomatoes.  Not on purpose, though.  He taught me by grabbing both sides of the butcher block and hoisting himself out of his wheelchair.  He stood with one leg leaning against the old block with decades of cigarette smoke, flour, oil, and garlic kneaded into it.  He taught me about homegrown tomatoes when he made sandwich bread.  He taught me how to make red sauce and homemade meatballs.  He taught me how to zest an orange, measure spices, and pour port wine.  He taught me how to make 200 pounds of sausage with a hand crank to grind the hand cut pork and stuff the hand mixed meat.  It was all with his own hands.  And he taught our hands how to make homegrown tomatoes.  Covered in pork is nearly the same as covered in dirt.  And cutting out the extra fat is just like weeding the garden.  Some are okay and others suffocate the flavor.

I don’t think a Roman Catholic funeral really allows you to feel the full weight of a death.  It’s in the small things, like your aunt denying that she ever shouted from the porch that she didn’t want kids.  Like not visiting for Thanksgiving anymore.  Like getting rid of the kids table because my grandmother couldn’t bear to stand up from her seat at the kitchen table.  Or maybe she couldn’t do it without stumbling over in a drunken stupor.  Or maybe there was never enough to warrant the big dining room table and the china gravy boat that stayed in the cupboard until the house was sold. No more carbs to count and insulin measurements to draw out.  Goodbye was ordering pizza from Little Caesars and having no reason to measure spices and pour port wine.  It’s been a decade since I have zested an orange for our garden.