Learning to be humble, that is my prayer.

Nancy and I drove home to Manhattan just at Sunday dusk under a streaked sky of steel gray long thin clouds and deep blue and pink background clouds.

We had spent the afternoon with my mother, bizarre in some ways, yet also ordinary.

We started out listening to an opera CD that my brother David made for my mother.  The music was to accompany the manicotti making that was about to begin.

"It just felt right," my mother said, "yesterday when I was making the pizza,to be listening to opera.  "Some of it was so sad," she said, "even though I didn't understand the words, I was  crying while I was standing at the stove."

 Then my mother  darted from the stove to her CD stash.

  "I love the Beatles," she said.   "Let's get rid of the opera."

  After she ejected poor Maria Callas just in the middle of the heart crushing Mio Bambino ( my mother doubted it was Maria Callas and since she is also a singer I should believe her)   she put in the Beatles ( or so she thought).

    She turned up the volume too loud, just like my teenage nephew does when he wants me to hear the latest music he loves, and she started sliding back and forth on her kitchen floor.

         "All we are saying is give peace a chance,"  she sang.

          I didn't have the heart (or the courage) to tell my mother it wasn't the Beatles, but an ex Beatle, John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono with The Plastic Ono Band.
          I just couldn't do it, it would have burst her Beatle bubble.


           She kept singing, her voice getting louder with each chorus, her fingers finding the volume control and turning it up each time they chanted, "all we are saying is give peace a chance." 

        "I just love the Beatles," she said again.

        I remembered another winter, years before 2011, when I was sixteen, my hippie boyfriend and I went Christmas caroling in our little suburban town.

      When we got to the first door and were about to knock, he said, "what carol should we sing ?"    "Let's sing "All we are saying is give peace a chance,"
I said,  completely taken with myself for a moment at the genius of that, the Vietnam war was still going on and I knew my town neighbors might have had a different opinion than my blue eyed bearded boyfriend and me.  I don't know if I was a rebel in the making or a brat.

      Back to my mother in her newly painted, newly sinked bright and cheerful kitchen - the song continued, Nancy and I looked at each other big smiles on our faces at my mother's glee at the song.


      The music changed, John Lennon and Yoko sang another song but my mother didn't sing along.  It was back to the lesson.
      The manicotti lesson we had come to learn

       The afternoon changed as the sun moved away from the yellow kitchen window.

  My mother got serious, giving instructions ( or orders ) to Nancy and me.

      She's always right, so it's hard to do anything but obey. 

        "Don't use that pan," she told me when I started to butter my small Cuisinart frying pan.

          I persisted, "Let me try, " I said.  Failure met me at the gate, and soon I had a ragged puddle of manicotti batter in the pan, doomed to feed the Pearl River birds with my ineptitude.

       The lesson continue more easily once I gave in to my mother's expertise.  
     
        While she cooked she told me a story I had never heard.   Picking up the manicotti shell with two fingers, hot to the touch but not too hot for her, and placing it gingerly onot the plastic wrap layers of finished shells, she said, " You know, Grandma De Leo used to make the manicotti shells in boiling water, it was not easy and often they fell apart in the water.  I saw this new method in a magazine and I told my mother-in-law about it.

    ( My grandmother was a master self taught cook.)

    My mother said, "She listened to this new method and concluded it was worth a try.

If it were me I probably wouldn't have tried it, but my mother-in-law had an open mind."

     Just like my father did, now I see where he got it from.

      By mid- afternoon my younger sister Dorothea had arrived.   She went to my mother's window- like mirror, staring into a pane.
   
 "Look at my wrinkles," she said, "they're coming."

     "Stop looking," Nancy laughed.  "That's what my twice face-lifted sister tells her clients, she works for a plastic surgeon and tell women to stop looking at their wrinkles..."
      and live. I wanted to add.

          By 4:00 pm the manicotti were constructed, one demonstration by my mother of how to carefully place the three cheeses was done Nancy and I were left to complete the task.

         My mother had calculated by eye exactly how much ricotta cheese was  needed to fill all 16 manicotti.

         I made the incorrect assumption as we were nearing the end that we would be short cheese and added some.

          My mother came over like a supervisor, "that was about right," she said, after looking at the cheese that remained.

      But as the last manicotti was stuffed I saw that the amount remaining was just about the amount I had added !

       My mother had been right.

       As usual.

        At 4:30 we were sitting down with the baked manicotti and a bottle of my mother's latest wine find, a California zinfandel called, Dancing Bear.
       
        "French is better," I said.    "No, I don't want to give my money to the French, I'd rather give it to California," she said.
        

        My mother had a broken wine opener, missing its most vital piece.  My mother told my sister to try anyway.

            My sister got the opener in the cork but couldn't pull the cork out.

        Nancy, a native Texan and petite, like a Dallas wrangler, planted her feet on the floor and released the cork.  The sound of the pop and the force of the cork releasing sent Nancy back a step or two and a small gush of red wine spilled onto the creamy light floor.

       My mom sat with her wine and her manicotti.  She ate the first bite.   "Good," she said.    "It's good."   

      "The cheese could be a little more melted," she added to her initial thumbs up.


      We all ate.silent.  Nancy closed her eyes and put the first bite into her mouth.   "Delicious," she said.


        At our meal my mother told a story about Lydia Bastinach and her daughter.   On their cooking show Lydia's daughter had baked a cake,
when it was time to cut it, she cut herself, my mother showed us with her hands, a large piece of cake.  My mother was horrified that they
would eat like this on TV slathering their cake with whip cream and pouring chocolate sauce over it.

      "Dad didn't like Lydia, " I said.   "He said she was what was called "high Italian."     (It means snobby, or thinking you are better than others.)

      "He was right," my mother said.

      "He was right, fortunately or unfortunately, about everything,"  she sighed, her head dropping down.


     We went away, each of us in that moment, to him, mourning him and loving him, speaking of him,  knowing he was with us, yet his physical absence so hard to understand, accept, and live with for both of us in our own way.

      We went to our own cone of grief then, like a silent tornado starting at our planted feet and lifting all the way to our head, grabbing us violently out of normality, a disaster,    returning with no pattern or prediction to when it may come back.

       I've stopped running from the tornado, as my father taught me about the ship heading into the waves not trying to avoid them, head in to the waves, and you will survive, try to circumvent them and you will perish.  Although it seems frightening to head into the storm you must.

      My own private tornado came up over my head at my childhood kitchen table so palpable and real to me I felt  almost like it could be seen, then it rushed away and we returned to our assessment of our homemade family meal, a meal my father would have loved, cooked by his favorite women for our favorite man. 


      He was a lucky man, and we were lucky too.