Birthday girl

I’d hear her tell about it.  I can’t imagine it, though.  Her stringing a bunny upside down and bapping it upside the head ’til it froze dead.  Bunnies. Chickens too.  A part of me always wanted to see what it was actually like, but that was when my grandmother was younger and in Portugal.  Maybe she whacked a few bunnies and chickens into poultry here too, I don’t know.  I just remember going to the specialty Portuguese store with her, where the rabbit was already dead and skinned and basically prepared to cook.  We might have been the only family in civilized history to eat rabbit on Easter Sunday.

Man, could she cook. After my grandfather passed, and before my asshole aunt would put her in a home, it was just her and I whenever I came to visit. I looked at her at the counter, her small frame, her big “caboose”, then back at the clock. I told myself, If you don’t get some of her recipes now, asshole, it’ll be too late.  So we would do that.  I’d sit at the table and she at the counter prepping this or that and she described what she was doing, what ingredients to put in.  She, like most great cooks, never spoke “tablespoon” or “cup.” Everything was just “a little.” I don’t cook nearly enough Portuguese.  I can’t be blamed entirely.  It’s impossible finding real Portuguese chorizo on this coast.  Big-ass Quahogs clams for her stuffed clams?  You can forget about pimento muido too, a relish seasoning that my grandmother used in just about everything. I’ll never forget helping her make it with a metal manual grinder. I did the cranking.

She worked in a sort-of assembly line. A switch shop. I just remember there were rows of long, high counters with stools for each worker.  I could probably tell what it was now, but back then I had no idea what I was looking at at her station. A relay?  Rheostat?  She would work there five days a week, then come home and cook.  For his part, my grandfather kept the house clean.  When I would visit her at the shop, all of my grandmother’s coworkers’ eyes were on me.  My grandmother spoke to them in Portuguese and apparently glowingly about me as their stares felt approving and even affectionate. My grandmother would look at me that way until her death.  No one’s ever looked at me that sweetly since. 

She kept a little hooch for when my dad snuck over, too. She loved my dad.  There was a whole life there before me, starting with him taking her daughter, my mom, for his bride and ending with him paying off their mortgage, my grandparents’ mortgage.  Who wouldn’t love someone for doing that?  Plus my dad never cheated on my mom.  At least as far as I could tell.  That’s saying something today.  But he would hightail it shortly after meeting his next wife.  It was just grandma and I from that point forward.

I would stay in my uncle’s room and hear her praying every night, whispering to Jesus in Portuguese.  I wish now I could have listened in on words she used.  My Portuguese was pretty good.  It was cute, funny: my grandmother would speak to me in Portuguese, catch herself, then speak English.  Until towards the end, when it was only Portuguese. 

I’ll never forget the time when I was following her home in my car.  My grandfather was in the passenger seat.  She accelerated and accelerated until, shit, I don’t know, twenty, twenty five over the speed limit?  Earlier that same afternoon, I was poking her about her age.  It’s like she was saying to me, Old, hunh?   Watch this.  That crazy bitch was just about flooring it. I could hear my grandfather jawing at her in the passenger seat.

She’s a hundred and some change today.  I miss her. 

More than any words can explain.