Memory

 This time of year is filled with memory, with sentimentality, with food …

The ham I got for our Friendsgiving is causing minor bouts of anxiety.  I’ve never cooked a whole ham before.

But I just had a flashback to 1989 …

Drew and I had just moved into a one bedroom apartment in Queens, NY, four blocks from the apartment where my grandmother and my two aunts were living.

At that time, family holiday dinners meant my parents, my three sisters, my grandmother and two aunts would gather together, usually at my parents’ Long Island home but occasionally at my grandmother’s house.  My aunts and my mother would share the cooking.

But for some reason we all decided that Drew and I would host the first night of Rosh Hashanah that year.  My two youngest sisters were away at college in Florida, but everyone else would be at my apartment.  I wouldn’t have to worry about cooking.  My aunt would prepare all the traditional dishes the night before and bring them to my house.  My mother would take a day off from work, and come to my house to make chicken soup and roast a turkey.

But my sisters decided to surprise us all …and my mother had to pick them up at the airport. I would have to make the soup and I would have to roast the turkey.  And I’d never done either before.

And my aunt, who worked in an office in Manhattan, had to give me instructions over the phone.

 I was a bit nervous. But everything turned out OK.

And I feel the same anxiety when I look at that ham in my refrigerator. This time there’s no aunt on the phone telling me what to do.

But Drew actually looked at the ham … it’s fully cooked, we just have to glaze it and heat it up …