HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY!

Memorial Day means many things. It’s the calendar-challenged beginning of the summer season. (Summer is always calendar challenged in Florida. It usually lasts from nine to eleven months.) It’s an anchor date for family reunions. Some just see it as a three-day weekend. It can be the first serious grilling day of the year. Hopefully most of us realize it’s the one day we’re given to honor those who have served our country.

I won’t be grilling this year. That’s because I haven’t grilled in years. I cook in my kitchen. I use the stovetop, oven, and microwave. So this year I’ll be in the kitchen. It may be hot. It may feel crowded. I’ll be making pork meatballs and thinking about my parents. They were both in the Army during World War II. Both confined to the U.S. My father was a sole surviving son back when that meant something and became a mechanic in the Army Air Corps. My mother was an orientation officer. That meant she taught women how to be WACs. She said she taught grown women how to use indoor plumbing, a pretty rough job for a girl from Chicago. Neither saw battle. Neither saw war. But they helped those who did.

My parents both had their Army stories. They were never stationed together. That guaranteed twice the amount of stories. Dad fried eggs on airplane wings in Tucson, Arizona. When he was stationed in Riverside, California, he made films with a couple of guys named John: Forsyth and Wayne. He also got to meet Doolittle on the way to Tokyo. Mom’s stories weren’t as celebrity-filled but she had food stories. Considered underweight by the Army, she got extra rations. She couldn’t eat all the food the Army gave her so she shared it with the women under her command. Mom’s little driver, minimum height and weight by Army standards, who cleared a jack-knifed semi tying up traffic by using her experience of getting through spots too small for even her, ate well for weeks.

I’ve often wondered whatever happened to my mother’s Purple Heart. She only had the ribbon, not the medal, because it wasn’t official. Someone she was stationed with the week the war ended had earned a real Purple Heart and given her the ribbon to honor her for a burn suffered cooking breakfast for my father after she married him.

That is tied to the story from Dad about being called on the carpet by his CO for getting married without his permission. Dad told the Colonial he was under orders from his wife and his wife out-ranked him. The war may have been over but the Army was still too busy for the Colonial to check to see the Sergeant on the other side of his desk had married a Lieutenant. Dad didn’t lie. The way he phrased it was correct. Mom outranked Dad. And that’s the way it went.

Whenever I think about my parents, I think about food. They fed me, of course, and helped form my opinions of what good food is. My father helped me plant my first garden when I was six or seven. My mother let me help cook our first harvest. Meals were a family affair.

Mother was famous for her spaghetti, cooked for what seemed like all day. It started with a recipe given to her from Gene Sage (of Sages Sage’s in Chicago) and continued on to suggestions from family and friends until it was perfect. We ate a lot of spaghetti dinners before Mom’s spaghetti sauce was perfected. It was never bad. And I’ve never been able to duplicate it.

Dad made breakfast every Sunday morning. Even on Father’s Day – unless I insisted on making French toast or pancakes. Every Sunday we had Dad’s stovetop frittatas. No need to light the oven with a tight-fitting lid for the frying pan. He called them open-faced omelets. He would make them using anything in the refrigerator. Sometimes that was just a stick of salami. Leftovers made it interesting. Tacos, chop suey, steaks, roasts, anything that wasn’t enough to make another meal. We loved our Sunday surprise breakfasts even when they were no surprise.

I miss my Army heroes, my parents. I see them every day in my mirror and hope to bring them with me throughout my life. Though Dad’s daily weapon may have been a wrench and Mom’s a chicken drumstick, they were my heroes as much as soldiers flying Dad’s planes and nurses who shared Mom’s meals. This day I thank all who served my country in any and every way they could.