We were supposed to have handled this for her, but Mammaw couldn't let us amateurs desecrate this Mother's Day meal, so she kept checking in on my stirring. As she did, I realized that I hadn't spent much time with her in the kitchen unless it was in line for the grub she's cooked. I hadn't watched her.
It was fascinating to me. Just the little bit she did, the subtle touches.
There were four pots on the stove. Two full of the rice we made, one where tea was brewing for the three gallon dispenser that'd fill the family, and another with ground beef in a curry gravy. This is the heart and soul of our family dinners: curry and rice. I grew up thinking everyone ate it, like the other foods we enjoyed: pot roast, mac n cheese, mashed potatoes. Didn't realize that this dish, like my mom and Mammaw's lives before me, were different than most. It, like their histories, were rooted in Africa, which itself was marked by other cultures. Namely India by way of Great Britain.
"The one thing you're doing that you don't want to do is keep stirring the rice," she said to me. She took a small clump and tasted it. "It's done."
And we left it be, putting the lid back on. The curry was still a little soupy but burning on the bottom because I wasn't stirring it. And I had it on high. Mammaw bumped me out of the way, grabbing the controls and adjusting everything calmly but quickly, telling me how to be of real help. My little world shifted in the ten seconds she took charge. I felt like I'd just watched an astronaut radio back to ground control, turning knobs on that multi-million dollar panel, displaying the poise of someone who trained endlessly to keep cool under pressure.
She still surprises me, which says a lot because she set the standard for surprise so high.
Their house was (and still is) adorned with the knick-knacks of world travel, especially the sort of things that a little kid's imagination runs wild with: the skins of exotic animals, spears, drums, masks, totems, and a mounted water buffalo head. And they came with stories of native head-hunters, of close-encounters with rhinos and buffaloes (like the one on the wall), of pistol packing and elephant guns, and giant snakes.
One of my favorite pictures in this whole world is of my Mammaw holding a rifle, standing resolutely with my mother as a little girl hidden behind her skirt. At their feet, a 15-foot snake missing its head.
The same woman that fed me chunks of honey and granola, calling them Scooby Snacks, who let me and my buddy Frank dig a swimming pool in her backyard, who tucked sheets on the couch so I could take a nap (but who would get mad if I put my shoes on the same couch), had also blown the head off of a monster snake.
Because my granddad, Pop, was in Africa for months at a time, we hardly saw him. He was something of an irregular curiosity for me. And we really only saw my paternal grandparents at the holidays and birthdays. So Mammaw was the super-grandparent, caring and compassionate, but also a bit of a bad ass.
And on Sunday, a Mother's Day, she made something that seemed so simple--stirring food--into an artform. I was humbled. The food had always been artful, but now I'm aware that the process is its own event.
On the way to her house, Heather's visiting friend, Beth, ran through the names and relations of my immediate family and asked "Is there anyone else?" Dozens.
"Yeah, but don't sweat it."
As I told her later, I was eight or nine before I had it figured out. There are routinely between 15-25 people at a family dinner.
Looking around the room at my siblings, aunts and uncles and cousins, and the little kids running around, I realized something else: this didn't exist before Mammaw. Not just in a biological sense, but I'd taken the closeness of my family for granted like I had taken the curry and rice for granted. (Everyone's this close, right?) Futher, this semi-regular gathering from points across the state wasn't a tradition she'd passed down to us. It was something she'd invented.
She's the center of our family. Our sun. We revolve around her. And her cooking. It's something she did so artfully that we followed her force of personality without struggle or resistance. Mammaw did something that is, in truth, really hard and made it look easy... more than easy: natural.
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