Visits

Saturday, November 23, 2019

Cheese

I was thinking this morning about cheese. 

Let me explain. 

After my usual coffee at Starbucks, I made then my usual round through Papaya market and I happened to see in the refrigerated foods counter not cheese but a certain meat--little disks of sliced salami ranged in neat plastic-wrapped rows. And this made me think of cheese.

Rather, it made me think of cheese by way of a brief thought-journey back to the time of my childhood and yearly visits on Christmas Eve to my aunt and uncles' quiet little apartment on buzzing Broadway Street. 

This was the event, every year, for years and years, that marked the true arrival of Christmas. It was always dark, it was always cold, it was always raining, or perhaps even snowing, and we would pile into my father's station wagon, with a certain solemnity, with a certain reverence really, and enter the beginning of Christmas itself, which was located on Broadway Street. 

We would enter the apartment, my brother and I would deposit our coats in the back bedroom, and then come back out to sit before the Christmas tree while the adults created suspense with needless small talk, the usual polite chitchat, and my uncle would try to calm the incurably high tempered dog, a little poodle named Pepi which every Christmas was dyed either pink or blue and was ever intent on biting guests.  

And then, after Pepi was locked in a back room (this was how he routinely celebrated Christmas) we would open our presents. 

These were not the real things, as we were instructed each year. They have no children of their own. Just act pleased and say thank you, even if it's only socks or pajamas. 

We understood. And really we did not need to be told. These were the first tastes of Christmas and were delicious in and of themselves. These packages--socks, handkerchiefs, piggy banks, dime store toys that broke the same day--these were inaugurations, the earnest of the day to come. 

And now the cheese. As we played with our miniature gumball machines or readily breakable toys, my aunt and uncle would retire to the kitchen and, always with a great clamor of glass dishes and testy exchanges and debates about whether or not Pepi ought to be released, prepare the coffee, the brimming glasses of soda pop, and, yes, the long anticipated yard-long platter of assorted meats and cheeses. 

These were not just any meats and cheeses. These were sophisticated meats and cheeses. Adult meats and cheeses. No meats and cheeses like the common meats and cheeses we saw throughout the rest of the year, but exotic things, impregnated with nuggets of jalapeno or green olive or little black seeds--salami, pastrami, bologna, roast beef, honey-baked ham, liverwurst; sharp cheddar, Swiss, Gouda, blue cheese. And by God we were actually allowed to eat them!

I remember most often falling asleep beside my brother and being awakened when the night had grown quiet and the rain had taken a breather for a time and Broadway was merely black and bare and glistening, nearly devoid of traffic. And we knew that the next thing we would know is that Christmas Day had come.

So it happened, these many years and miles later, that I experienced in the middle of the Papaya market an insatiable craving for meats that can never again be consumed. And yet the memory remains a delicacy of its own, not to be matched or outdone by others, sweet and rich on the tongue of time, more a fullness, really, than a hunger.


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