The Bitter and the Sweet

     As this is the first Thanksgiving without Dad, I can't help being more than usually reflective. I remember that in earlier years, Dad's main culinary contribution to our Thanksgiving meals was his mashed potatoes, made extra special by adding an egg while smashing the still-hot potatoes. (Don't worry; the heat was enough to cook the egg.) Though my intellect perceives his physical absence, my heart and deeper instincts know that the cliché is true: he is still with us in spirit.

     My father was not a talkative man, except when people encouraged him to speak of his experiences in World War II. At family gatherings he usually sat quietly at the head of the table, eating slowly while listening to the constant babble going on around him. Ours is, after all, a family dominated by strong, opinionated, funny women with penetrating voices. (There is also my laid back brother with his dry, sly wit.) In later years, when Dad was even more quiet, I wondered what he thought of all our chatter on literature, films, and food. He certainly shared few of our tastes—while we would devour Austen, he preferred war accounts; while we would laugh over It's Complicated, he preferred Zulu; and while we would rhapsodize over poached salmon with asparagus vinaigrette, he would happily consume a plateful of fried rice with sardines.

     Just the other day, my mother and sister and I were talking about the merits of freshly grated coconut. We recalled how Dad would take a coconut and crack it over a pan in the sink—he turned the coconut over and over in his hands, somehow found exactly the right spot, then whacked it with the blunt side of a cleaver. The two halves always broke cleanly without shattering, and the pure coconut water would gush out into the pan. After cracking all the coconuts, he would then sit in the middle of the kitchen on his special grater—a sort of wooden footstool-like contraption with a round, serrated blade protruding from one end.



     He'd place a large cake pan underneath the blade, sit on the grater, and scrape one coconut half after another until there was a snowy mound of moist, fragrant flakes in the pan. Then he would give me the shells so I could scrape out what meat was left with a grapefruit spoon. Ahhhh....... Packaged coconut tastes like Styrofoam beside such ambrosia! My mother would wash the freshly grated meat, squeezing all the good milk out to be used in the broth of ginataan, the Filipino dessert "stew," a warm concoction containing sweet potatoes, sweet rice balls, and bananas; the meat was usually used for palitaw, delectable poached patties made of sweet rice flour, coated with fresh coconut and sprinkled lightly with white or brown sugar.
 

ampalaya, or "bitter melon"

 

     Dad's home-grown produce showed up on our table regularly. He loved growing the vegetables he grew up eating in his native country: ampalaya (known to non-Filipinos as bitter melon, the odd-looking green squash with little irregular bumps all over it), sitaw (very long, skinny green beans), and Philippine eggplant and tomatoes. He would tend to his garden whenever the weather allowed; in the hottest summer months I remember him in his wide-brimmed straw hat, long white pants, and long-sleeved white cotton shirt, working among his vines and shrubs until Mom called him in to supper: "Basta kanà!" ("Enough now!")

     We miss him, of course. I look at his rocking chair in the living room, and, with my mind's eye, I see him sitting there, and with my mind's ear I hear myself asking him, "Are you cold? Do you want your balabal (blanket)?"

     Thanksgiving is not the same. But we are not without him.