All Eyes on Me

For the first time as an adult and after many, many years, I have made my favorite dessert as a child— a chocolate dream pie in an Oreo crust.

My mother wouldn’t make a lot of processed desserts when we were growing up, but this is the one. Dream whip mixed with pudding mix and milk, beaten to a fluffy consistency and chilled, in a crust made out of Oreo cookies. My favorite thing to eat in the world as a little kid.

My tastes as an adult don’t run as a sweet as they did when I was a kid, so I’m not a hundred percent sure I’ll like it anymore. But it’s chilling in the fridge now, and I’m excited to try.



I have sampled it now. It’s a LOT, so I can’t exactly inhale it the way I used to when I was little. But it’s very tasty, and even though I’m not a person with a lot of sensory memories, I took a bite and it tasted like a dozen Christmases. 🙂 That made me smile.

Bernie gave me the idea for this. His little baby niece has a weird little baby toy that is a bunny head with a blanket for a body, and its name is Susan, a hilariously prosaic name to me for such a silly toy. I joked that I should send her a toy named Karen from Finance and insist that anytime anyone refers to the toy, they must refer to her by her full title. So Bernie said I should write a humorous piece for the challenge about these very mundane matters tackled by these officer-worker-sounding characters at their job at Baby, Incorporated. So I did.


The boss and Susan

( Day #27 - Baby, Incorporated )

I'm super excited for Thanksgiving this year. My family is coming to my house, which I like because it makes me feel like a grownup, so I will be spending it with my dad, my brother, his girlfriend, and, for the first time ever, Bernie.

I have had the cooking and baking bug hardcore lately, so I'm champing at the bit to have the chance to make a huge elaborate meal. We've had basically the same Thanksgiving since I was a tiny child, and I'm not planning on changing up the dinner menu much. That makes a roast turkey with a kind of French country-inspired stuffing that was my mom's invention, whipped mashed potatoes, roast brussel sprouts, a fancy pear and parsnip puree, spicy cranberry sauce, and croissants in place of dinner rolls. It's a homey meal that I really love, and one I look forward to all year.

The differences I'm introducing this year are mostly to do with the baking and dessert. We usually buy croissants, but this time I think I want to try my hand at making them from scratch. It's definitely not an easy task, as it involves making a laminated dough, but I think beautiful homemade pastry would be a fun challenge and a nice addition to the table. I am using a recipe by Paul Hollywood, the judge on the Great British Bake Off. I'll have to convert some of the measurements to Imperial, and there's probably easier version out there, but I'm kind of on a kick with him right now. He knows his stuff, and, because I am shallow and easily manipulated by personality, I like his spiky hair, his blue eyes, and his slightly coarse accent.

I'm also going to make a pumpkin cheesecake for Casey and Sarah. Our usual family desserts and pumpkin and apple pies, which I really do love, but I wanted to shake things up this year, and Casey asked for cheesecake. Again I've never made one before, but I'm trying to expand my baking repetoire. For this I'm using a recipe of Alton Brown's, who is my go-to guy for when I want to try a dish I've never done before. This one is from his personal website, so sadly there is no corresponding Good Eats video, but he did do a regular cheesecake episode which I've watched for reference. With this version we can keep the presence of pumpkin on the table somehow.

The only real sticking point is Bernie's keeping kosher. My family lives on butter combined with meat, and up to this point it's been an integral part of our Thanksgiving recipes. My dad is not enthusiastic about the idea of a kosher Thanksgiving, so it's up to me to manage the cooking so that it goes as smoothly as possible. If I can pull it off so that it's not a pain in the butt to do, and the food comes out just as good, then I hope that will send the message that Bernie joining us for holidays is not a kink in the gears. I think if that precedent is set, it won't be an issue for the future.

Most of our holiday traditions are doing things we've been doing since Casey and I were born, basically, and never really involved anyone besides the four of us. We're all introverted to a degree, and part of the appeal was to celebrate exactly the way we liked it without having to put on anything for company. But I want Bernie to be part of my family now, joining us for our celebrations-- and honestly one of the advantages of being a mixed-faith couple is we can each celebrate our most important holidays in the way we prefer. Still, this is a small hurdle I'll have to work out.

Currently my plan is to start with Alton Brown's recipe for roast turkey with stuffing and adapt it to my purposes. I'm going to use my mother's stuffing instead of his, but follow his cooking instructions because his version doesn't use butter. I really hope you can't taste the difference too much-- everything is better with butter, and I don't want my dad to be disappointed. The extra stuffing that won't fit in the bird we usually put in a pan and bake separately as a dressing, so that can have butter in it-- though no meat juice from the turkey. The brussels sprouts can be done as we usually do them, as can the cranberry sauce. I think we'll do two versions of the mashed potatoes, one with milk and butter and one without. I hate margarine and think it's basically like eating toxic waste, but maybe I ought to pick some up just for Bernie's sake. The pear and parnsip requires sour cream and I'm not sure if there's anything that can substitute for it. He'll just have to wait on the croissants and desserts, but that's what usually happens anyway.

I hope it works out. Integrating new people into family gatherings can be tricky, but at least I've got a plan.

My grandfather, Arthur William Roberts, passed away this week. He was the life of the party, a WWII combat veteran, a loving and supportive presence, and the man who taught me to love and be proud of my Italian heritage. He was very old and had a great life. He was at the point where he wasn't really mentally present anymore. There's no particular tragedy in this, though we'll miss him, and he was my last living grandparent.



I have to go to Pittsburgh for the funeral, and as much as I want to be there to say goodbye properly, I am not looking forward to the trip. In order to not miss either any of my new classes and to have enough time to do the outside prep work, it's going to be a whirlwind. I'll have to go off my diet, I'm sure. There won't be any way to take my smoothies with me, and it would be a huge pain to try to get the right supplies and make them. I'm allowed one cheat day, but I'll have to do two, and that displeases me. Because, like most funeral trips, I got the plane tickets at the last minute, they both have connecting flights so they didn't cost an arm and a leg. I have to get up at 4:30 on Sunday to get a shuttle to the airport to get on a 7am flight, and then not arrive until 11:45pm in Boston on Monday, for the shuttle to take me home by 1. And then get up and teach first thing the next day.

So I think the whole business is going to be pretty unpleasant. I've been tired enough from adjusting to my new schedule-- I'm only in week three --that I don't relish that wrench being thrown into the works.

I have talked about my mother’s death here before. But today, on the one-year anniversary of her passing, I want to talk about the night she died. I don’t have much point to make. This is a very disjointed, stream-of-consciousness entry. But I’m ready to talk about it, and I want to have a record of what it was like.

Casey, Sarah, and I drove down together. We came home into a very clean house—partially, I think, for all the people who would be coming in, and partially as way for my dad to feel in control. He’s a strong man— believe me when I say almost impossibly so —but he channels stress into things like that. He had food waiting for us. And he took us upstairs to see Mom.

They had put a hospital bed next to the big bed in their bedroom. That was good, she hadn’t wanted to die in the hospital. She wasn’t conscious; she was on a sort of liquid morphine that basically knocked her out. They put her on oxygen, but it wasn’t doing much good, and she kept gasping, trying to breathe. She couldn’t, really, but her body would try to anyway.

Dad was so in tune with her condition, with everything he’d done to take care of her. He’d called the previous day and said it would happen very soon. And we went home the next day, because he was right.

He asked if we remembered the part in Harry Potter with the thestrals, which are only visible to you after you’ve seen someone die. “I think we’re going to see thestrals soon.” He’s not usually one to talk in literary references, so that one struck me.

A hospice nurse came and spoke to us. We were kind of normal and together, which I think surprised them a little. But we don’t act out in front of strangers. I was proud, though, when the nurse took a moment to tell my dad how impressed they all were with how my dad took care of her. She actually said she’d never seen anything like it. He is strong, and he loves her.

It was very surreal. How normal it was, while Mom was right there dying. Mostly it was waiting. We’d sit with her for a while, holding her hand, talking to her. My dad and my brother had a lot to say. How much they loved her, but how it was okay for her to go, that she didn’t need to hurt anymore. Neither of them have ever been afraid of or uncomfortable with their emotions, but their frankness and their verbosity impressed me. This process made my brother a lot softer. And my dad, well, he’s perceived by some to be a hard, intense man. But he loved my mother utterly. Reordered his whole life to be there for her in her illness. And damn certain he was going to tell her everything as she died.

Dad told us stories of how they met, when they were young. How they were friends for years before they ever dated. How after graduation they traveled cross country to Yellowstone National Park in a van with three other friends and a German Shepherd. How they were camping in the park, smoked some weed, and went swimming at the same time there happened to be an earthquake, but because they were high, they weren’t sure if they imagined it or not. How my mom said to my dad, “If you grow up a bit, you might be worth keeping.” It made me smile to hear all that. Funny to think of my straight laced parents being cooler and more adventurous than me.

I just cried a little, quietly. Weirdly, I found I didn’t know what to say, and felt too embarrassed to try. Words are supposed to be my thing, and I didn’t have any for my dying mother.

It’s okay. She knew how I felt, and she couldn’t hear anything anyway. But it was weird.

So we sat with her, listening to her try to breathe. Then we’d get hungry, or have something to do, so we’d wander off and do it. Dad had a little camera set up in the room, so we could watch her from the kitchen. In case it happened, we could rush up and be there.

She looked like a scary troll. I feel awful about thinking that, but she did. Not like my mother at all. Her hair was gone, her face and body were bloated and stressed. She had tubes coming out of her all over. Horrifying. The picture of death.

We took a picture of her. Not sure why. I guess because it was real, it happened, and there’s no pretending that it didn’t. I have it and Casey has it, but my dad asked us not to show it to anyone. It’s private. It’s the last picture of my mother on this earth.

Casey’s girlfriend Sarah was with us. My family is private, intensely so, so it was a question as to whether or not she would come for this part of things. Bernie was working, so in deference to both of those things I had chosen not to bug him until there was actually a funeral. Dad probably would have been okay if Bernie came. Though in fairness he hasn’t known Bernie as long. Casey and Sarah had been together for like six years then, and he wanted her there, and Dad was fine with that.

Sarah was so good. The whole time I couldn’t imagine how awkward everything had to be for her. Being in the middle of other people’s uncomfortable, private, tragic moment. But she was perfect, being present and quietly, lovingly supporting my brother. I have so much respect for how she conducted herself in what had to be a deeply difficult situation. I already liked Sarah, but that was when she became family.

It was late when it happened. When the life finally slipped out of her. Her breath, already choppy, became more and more infrequent. She twitched for a while. Then she was still.

I posted on Livejournal when it happened. And Twitter, I think. That’s probably kind of sick that I even thought of it. But I wanted to mark the moment.

Dad called the hospice. They would send the right people. So we waited, there in the bedroom with the remains of Mom. I had been laying on my parents’ bed, right beside her hospital bed. I stayed there, staring at her as she went cold. Her skin became so gray, that weird troll that replaced my mother.

Nobody came for a long time. Everyone curled up someplace and slept. I don’t know where everyone ended up. I think Casey was on the floor. I slept there beside her. It didn’t seem strange. She was either a sack of dead disease, or she was my mother. I’m not afraid of either.

The hospice nurse came. I dragged myself up, sat in a chair and was polite. Same as I was with the nurse the previous day, be nice to the stranger, have good manners, even if you just lost the most important person. She asked for all mom’s medications and destroyed them. She was decent and said nice things, but I don't really remember what they were.

Two men in suits came from the funeral home. My dad remarked how weird it seemed to come ready to move a body dressed in a suit, but I guess it was supposed to be gesture of respect. They were very careful gathering her up, zipping her into the body bag. I watched them do it, which likely made them take extra pains, but honestly I didn’t care. In that gray shell there was more remaining of the cancer that killed her than there was of my mother. What did I care what happened to a dead sack of tumors, when the person who bore me, raised me, loved me, made me who I am, was already gone forever?

I went to my own room and slept. The next day, I stripped the hospital bed, washed the clothes, made up the guest bed. They were the only sheets we had that fit it. Bernie and I slept that night on the sheets my mother died on.

I mention all this because it feels like it should have been weird or creepy. But none of it was. At least not to me. I just love her, and miss her, and I still don’t quite believe she’s gone.

My dad came into town this weekend, and my brother and I had a great visit with him. We went out to Bricco for dinner Friday night, which is this wonderful Italian restaurant in the North End. I almost never eat out anymore, certainly not at places of that caliber, so it was a real treat. We ordered pumpkin tortellini, tuna tartare, and beef carpaccio for appetizers, and for our entrees we got duck, swordfish quenelles, and vension. I'd never actually had venison before, and even though it's supposed to be very lean and a bit tough, I was shocked at how tender they were able to make it. Then we went to a nearby pastry place for turtle cheesecake and tiramisu.



On Saturday we went to the MFA, which I'm ashamed to admit I've only been to twice in all the time I've lived here. We saw the Chihuly exhibit years ago, which was wonderful, but I haven't been back since. The main attraction they have now is on Hokusai, the world's most famous Japanese artist, who worked in paint and block printing and whose most recognizable image is The Great Wave off Kanagawa, the first in his "Thirty-Six Views on Mt. Fuji" series.

The ads for it on the museum website didn't wow me, but once we were actually in it, I thought it was great. It was actually neat, because though I wasn't really familiar with his work, but as soon as I saw the Great Wave image, I recognized the art style from a print my dad has had on his office wall since before I was born. It's of a fisherman and a little boy standing on a rock, casting nets into a sea done exactly in the style of the wave. Apparently Dad's print, which he picked up just because he thought it looked cool on his very first business trip to Japan, is number thirty-two in that same series.



I always thought the boy looked like a little sea otter in a jacket.

His work is really distinctive and beautiful, notable for its blue outlines and the way it combines traditional Chinese mythology with depictions of daily life in Edo Japan. He's a lot older than I would have expected, having worked from the late 1700s to the mid 1800s, and he wasn't discovered until he was in his seventies.

We actually loved everything we saw. We checked out the early American exhibit, with its Colonial furniture and portraits of the founding fathers, the American modern, full of Pollock and Warhol, the Cubists with Picasso, Matisse, and Duchamp, and the Impressionists, the Van Gogh, Monet, Degas, and Gaugin. My family particularly loves Impressionism, the brushstrokes, the walking-away effect, the soft, vibrant colors, the intensely personal nature of it. My mom was a big fan and a longtime student of it, so we grew up with that sort of art in our lives, and she taught us to love it. The ones in the MFA are so warm and exciting, like looking out a window to a bright clear day to a picturesque part of France. They even had Degas's Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, one of my favorite sculptures of all time. It made us all very happy, and made me remember my mother teaching me about this stuff.



We wanted to stay longer and see more-- we were headed to the Ancient Roman section at this point --but apparently it closes at five. We were sad, but we consoled ourselves by going to then eat a metric ton of raw oysters. But I definitely want to go back. They're free with a valid student ID to a Boston-area school.

My dad recently has taken an interest in ancestry and genealogy. I think it has something to do with my mother’s death and a desire to preserve family history. He has made an elaborate chart of our family, both his side and my mother’s side, on Ancestry.com, partially thanks to other people who have listed our family members and allowed us to connected them to our tree. It’s been interesting; though most of my great-grandparents were peasant immigrants who arrived in America around the turn of the century whose ancestors we know little about, my one grandmother was a descendant of a family that can be traced back twelve generations to Ireland in the 1700s. And we learned those people existed because my dad found them on the site.

The site also offers genetic testing to tell you what your genetic pedigree is. It maps your genes and tells you where in the world those genes were thought to originate going back thousands of years. We decided to do that after we saw the results of a test my paternal grandfather took. He’s a first-generation Italian-American and conforms rather strongly to the stereotypical look. We were astonished to find that though he is mostly genetically of the Italian-Greek strain we’d expect, he was many other things we didn’t realize— he was about twenty percent North and Sub-Saharan African, for example, as well as a small fraction of Iberian, Persian, and Caucasian. (This makes me laugh to think of my racist British-American great-grandfather, who didn’t want my grandmother marrying my granddad because he didn’t like Italians. HOW’D YOU LIKE THAT HE’S ONE-FIFTH BLACK TOO SO SUCK IT.)

Mine and my dad’s tests came in too now. This is me:



And this is my dad:



Look at me. I am NINETY-THREE PERCENT WHITE EUROPEAN. Whiter than my dad, although interestingly more Italian than he is, when he visibly conforms to the visual stereotype of one. People tend to think I look WASPy, which is funny because despite my dad’s big chunk of British I got almost none. And of my mother’s family, who was Italian on one side and white and Asiatic Russian on the other, it seems I only got the Italian! We were making jokes about me being found in a space pod in a field until Ancestry.com confirmed the genetic relationship. I’m weirdly disappointed. I have a Mongolian great-grandfather! My dad’s dad is twenty percent African! And I end up assorted flavors of cracker.

My grandmother certainly considered herself to be white. Her name was Julia Leone, nee Gush, and though I never had the chance to ask her about it or anything, that was still pretty clear. She had plenty of reason to. She had skin that was within the reason range of shades for a white person and no features that marked her otherwise. Her maiden name had any indication of ethnicity mangled out of it before she was born, while her married name, though Italian, was white enough. Her husband was white; she was even the mother of a pink-skinned, green-eyed, yellow-haired girl-- the proverbial angelic blonde child. The culture she sprang from and identified with is white culture. If you saw a picture of her, chances are you would not think anything different.

But really... my grandmother wasn't all white. Not completely. She was a first-generation Russian-American. Both of her parents emigrated from Russia in the early Twentieth Century. They met, married, and had eleven children in a small town outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one of whom was my grandmother Julia. They spoke Russian, worshipped at a Russian Orthodox Church, and identified with the associated ethnicity. My great-grandmother Anna Sherba was fair and blonde, the source of Mom's looks, so unlike either of her parents. This is not an usual appearence for an ethnic Russian, but I was very surprised to hear it-- after all, Grandma, the foremost representative of Russian blood in my life, had sharp features and dark coloring. But that's because of my great grandfather, Tymko Gush, known sometimes as James Gush, whose real surname was lost to Americanization a hundred years ago. According to my Mom, he had tan skin, high cheekbones, and almond shaped eyes. To look at him, he was not a white man, he was obviously Asian.

Because of the Mongolian conquest of the area that would become Russia, there are parts of it where the inhabitants have quite a bit of Asian blood. I'm not positive, but my great-grandfather may have even been Siberian, where it is particularly common. Because of this his ethnicity would be hard to qualify, since he was likely the product of generations of mixed people marrying other mixed people, but he was probably some proportion of Asian and white. That combination is likely the reason why my grandmother looked as white as she did. But it makes me wonder-- what did my great-grandfather consider himself? Did he think of the white versus nonwhite issue? Or was he just "a Russian," a more important distinction in a new country where so few share your ways and customs? I have no idea if there's any conflict between Russians of pure Caucasian decent and the Russians who have some Asian in them. In America, I know pretty much every immigrant in my family suffered some poor treatment from someone on account of their ethnic background. Did my great-grandfather ever get treated differently for someone recognizing him to be nonwhite?

I think of my immediate family. Now on the third generation in this country, my family appears very white, and benefits from the associated privilege. In fact, people have assumed that we must have the very highest level of privilege that being white in this country can possibly confer on you because of how well we present-- that we're not descendents of relatively recent immigrants (we are), that we do not have a close working class history (we do), that we come from people who are rich and educated (we don't). My grandparents-- poor, uneducated, and foreign --did not experience that same privilege. Their backgrounds made them targets for all kinds of hate and discrimination; even my mother and father faced some of that growing up. But still, the time and place my grandmother lived, when you're already suffering because you're ethnic, well, at least you're not tormented for being nonwhite. Getting to claim whiteness was some status better than none. So I guess it's not so strange that my grandma would forget or ignore that part of herself. After all, people tend to consider you to be what you look like. When she looked around, in the mirror or at her blonde daughter, it was probably easy to forget.

Tymko Gush, however, is not the only one I wonder about on that side. My great-grandmother Anna makes me wonder as well. She came to this country from Galitzia, a small area that has been owned by several countries but at the time was Russia, at the age of seventeen to escape the Bolsheviks. At the time, many Jewish families were fleeing from the exact same place to America as well. Her first job in the country was working as a maid for a Jewish family. And I realized when I came to Brandeis that many of the weird "family words" we'd been using-- nebbish, noodge, schmatta --were Yiddish, and had come into use because Anna used them. Those are small things, but they made me wonder... could my great-grandmother have actually been born a Jew?

My mother scoffs at the idea. That blonde ethnic Russian? This was the woman who took her to church every Sunday, who was devoutly Russian Orthodox her entire life. She explains the Yiddish with Anna's maid job when she was first learning English, so their words became her words. (Also, it turned out we used them mostly wrong.) Mom's almost certainly right; of course she knew the woman and I never did. But I can't help wondering, if for only one reason-- Anna Sherba was my mother's mother's mother. So if she was Jewish, then under the law, so are we. So am I.

I know myself to be a white Christian. Though I acknowledge my background to be infintessimally nonwhite, I think it would be silly to consider myself as anything else. That part of me is extremely small and extremely distant from me, plus I see a pale face and Caucasian features when I look in the mirror. But it's fascinating to know it's there in my background-- that I'm a little more complex than meets the eye. And I'm a Christian in my bones. I've heard of people discovering their Jewish heritage and deciding to return to it, but I can't imagine why that alone would be enough to draw you. It certainly wouldn't compel me. But how strange to think that a fact in the past could possibly make something true, that, without its acknowledgement, seems like a fanciful impossibility. I could, technically, be a Jew. It doesn't change me... but it changes something.

Funny how these things work.

Some family pictures my parents sent me just now.

This is my mom with her dog, Merlin, on the right and her friend's dog, Buster, on the left. She loves dogs.



And this is a picture of my paternal grandparents, Gertrude and Arthur Roberts, on Valentine's Day.



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