Thoughts from a Thinking Girl

My Great Aunt turns 88 this Christmas. Growing up, she was the baker in the family. She whipped sponge cakes to 10 inch height. By hand. She had a tall metal bowl and a whisk. She walked around her kitchen stirring and walking and stirring and walking until she determined that she had them exactly as she wanted them. She baked cakes and tortes and was the first and only person I knew back in my Midwestern suburb who breaded and pan fried zucchini and eggplant. I cannot for the life of me recreate 99 percent of her creations. But the 1% I do is her pistachio torte.

 

It’s light and airy and sweet and dreamy and creamy. Thanks to Jell-O brand gosh-only-knows-what’s-in-it pistachio pudding mix, there is a middle layer of bright neon green smooth nutty sweetness tucked between a layer of cream-cheese and Cool Whip and pure Cool Whip on the top. It’s heaven. For those who think there must be chocolate in something to be dessert, I dare you to find the tiniest iota of anything missing from her torte. I never have.

 

Her recipe, written by hand, was given to my Mother, who re-wrote it for me, and later, typed it up and emailed it to make sure I still had it. A recipe that goes back . . . how many years? Did her mother make it for her? Or did she find it on her own and add it to her repertoire?

 

She used to work at the local grocery store. My best friend and I would walk or ride our bikes to the store many, many afternoons after school. Even though we had allowance money in our pockets, if Aunt Marion was working, she’d slip us a dollar from her pocket for us to get treats. A candy bar. A bag of chips. Pure contraband for elementary school kids, things your parents would never agree to buy when they were doing the weekly shopping. It’s only now that I realize what it meant that each day as she headed to work she made sure to have a dollar in her pocket, not in her wallet which was in the back where employees could keep coats and purses and snow boots and such. Every day she pulled a dollar bill out of her wallet and put it in her pocket, stood on her feet as a cashier for hours, that dollar bill at the ready for the moment my friend and I appeared.

 

It’s what we do, not what we feel, that is the truest definition of love. Yes, on special occasions and holidays my Great Aunt worked her eventually gnarled hands through batter and dough and food to create sublime dishes. But in her every day actions, she kept me in mind, and put a very hard earned dollar in her pocket, racking up what must have been quite an expense, offering it up with regularity and the ease of true generosity – making me believe she just so happened to have a dollar to spare. It shames me to realize how little I understood then.

 

My Great Aunt was the relative who loved most passionately in my family. She adored her husband, long after most mothers, aunts, and family friends had more of a tolerance and mild disdain for their decades-long mates. She fretted over his clothes for work, over his dinner. They argued, in ways people in my family didn’t, and then made up – again in ways my family didn’t. Everyone loved Donny. He could do no wrong, at least not according to my grandmother, who loved her little brother with a big sister’s big heart. He never disappointed her; she never belittled him.

 

These days, I live 1200 miles away from my Great Aunt who lives alone in a senior complex. She has been widowed for a very long time. I haven’t shared holidays with her for such a long time, let alone the times when she and my Great Uncle were part of our regular lives. I think of her far less than I ought to, call less frequently than her importance to me warrants. I try to incorporate her philosophy of daily acts of love, but I realize that I do that more for the people under my roof, not relatives at a distance.

 

Thank you, Aunt Marion, for your willingness to transform love into daily acts of generosity, acts so light and airy I barely recognized the effort and time and thoughtfulness behind them. I have a gorgeous pan of your pistachio torte in the fridge, to enjoy over the long Thanksgiving weekend; something light and creamy to make up for the requisite heaviness of last night’s Thanksgiving feast. My first bite was sublime; the memories it evokes match the flavor. I only wish we could share it with you. I’ll call you later today, the smallest morsel of repayment for the countless desserts and dollar bills of my childhood.