Monday, December 22, 2014

Making the Bones -- A Christmas Meditation

© 2014 by John LaTorre


It is December, and as usual I am making “Ossi di Morte.” These little bone-shaped cookies come from southern Italy. Sources on the Internet inform me that they are traditionally made for the “Day of the Dead” in November, but my family has always regarded them as Christmas cookies, and I have followed suit.



They are not the easiest cookies to make. It's not the ingredients, which are simplicity itself: flour, eggs, confectioner's sugar, and baking powder. (Several recipes call for using just egg whites, and adding almonds, almond extract, or vanilla, but mine doesn't). The only thing I add to the family recipe is a teaspoon or two of water, which makes the dough easier to handle.
For this is where the difficulty comes in: to make them in the traditional way, you take a small handful of the dough, squeeze it into the approximate shape and size of a hot dog, and roll it out on an unfloured board, using only light pressure from the flat of your hand. Push too hard, and the roll crumbles. My Aunt Molly Guido, who taught me how to make these cookies, stressed this. “It's like petting a kitten,” she would say. “Light touch! Light touch!” Gradually, I got the hang of it.
Molly's name wasn't always Molly. When she was born, in 1914, she was christened Carmela LaTorre, after her mother's sister. She was the fourth child born to her parents, who had moved the family from Italy three years before. She had three older sisters, two born in Italy and one in the United States. Two boys and another girl would complete the family before the decade was out.
When the children entered school, they didn't know English. Perhaps to help with their assimilation into American culture, some were given non-Italian nicknames. Porzia became “Grace,” Carmela became “Molly,” Giuseppe became “Joe” and Vincenzo became, inexplicably, “Jimmy” (creating so much confusion in later years that he had it legally changed to “James”). Joe was my dad. None of the documents I'd ever seen ever referred to him as “Giuseppe,” only as “Joseph,” so perhaps that was his legal name from birth, but he was always called Giuseppe until he entered school. Only my aunts Anna, Antonia, and Angelina used the names they were given at birth, although the latter two preferred “Tony” or "Antoinette" and “Angie.”
I can picture Molly with her sisters, watching their mother make the “bones.” They would have talked in Italian – or more specifically, Barese, a dialect so different that my father had trouble speaking conventional Italian when he visited that country, although the farther south he traveled, the more familiar the language became. As I roll the dough down from the diameter of a hot dog to that of a Sharpie, I am wondering what my grandmother used for a metric, since she probably had never seen a Sharpie in her life. A finger's thickness? Which finger? Whose finger? It is too late to ask Molly, since she died years ago.
I roll the dough, I roll the dough.
As I form the dough, I am thinking about my ancestors. My brother Joe has just sent me a CD with hundreds of pictures on it, all from my late father's photograph albums. Some of the faces are familiar to me, although they look impossibly young. There are many pictures of my grandfather, and I recognize him instantly, although I have no direct memory of him, since he died the year after I was born. But all his children bear some resemblance to him. He is usually shown seated. And there are many of my grandmother, in various stages of her life, gardening and talking and holding grandchildren.


Other faces are strangers to me. Their pictures date from the turn of the last century, and they glare out at the camera as if it would bite them. I wish I knew who they were. I'm afraid that their identities will be forever lost, since my father seldom took the time to caption the pictures he kept. Most of these pictures are cracked and faded. For that matter, most of the memories I have of my relatives are also cracked and faded, and some of them, like the smells of our family's summer house on Otisco Lake and the feel of my mother's winter coat, are lost forever. My memories are now inaccurate and can no longer be trusted for veracity. I have idealized my past.



Out of the corner of my eye, I catch sight of our black cat Sable darting out of the room. Sable died three years ago. There are many ghosts walking tonight.
I roll the dough, I roll the dough.
I agonize whether to add a little more water to the batch. “Never add water,” Molly would say. “It makes the dough sticky.” Well, yes it does, but it also facilitates the shaping of the dough into a cylinder of ever diminishing thickness. I compromise by wetting my hands and then wiping them dry, hoping that the residual moisture will suffice to make the dough tractable. This is not the traditional way. There are all sorts of traditions wrapped up in the making of these cookies: beat the eggs for five minutes, let the cookies sit overnight for twelve hours (some recipes say twenty-four) before putting them in the oven, don't add water, bake at 325 degrees. What would happen if I beat the eggs for six minutes, and let the cookies sit out only eight hours, and baked them at 350? I don't know; I've never tried it. If I did, the magic might not work. Magic and tradition go hand in hand with this sort of things, commingled so tightly that they are impossible to separate.
I think all traditions are like that, at heart. As I work, my mind drifts to Christmas eves of past years, of midnight Masses in cold churches, of the Christmas music my parents played on their hi-fi or stereo. I am listening to some of that music right now. My father transferred most of his old Christmas records onto cassette tape, and my brother has transferred those tapes to CD. So I am listening not only to the music but to all the artifacts of that process: the pops of the record, the hiss of the tape, the unsteady “wow” of worn record changers and tape drives. If I listened to clean copies of those recordings, would they evoke the same nostalgia that I feel when I hear the flawed ones? Or would the magic not be there?
I roll the dough, I roll the dough.
On the CD my brother sent me, there are many pictures of my father as a vigorous young man, working in the camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps or sailing a canoe on the lakes around Syracuse. And there are pictures of my mother as a young woman, very glamorous. I see them on their wedding day, and in the first house they lived in as a couple. There are other photos of various aunts, uncles, and cousins on their wedding days. My brother's two weddings are pictured, but not mine. There are no pictures of my first wife at all. There are a few pictures of my present wife when she first visited Syracuse and New Port Richey in the mid-1990s, before we married. She had a chance to meet most of my aunts, uncles, and cousins on my father's side. Now all those aunts and uncles have passed away, along with my father and mother.
Many of my older cousins have also passed away now, and I find to my surprise that my cousins and my siblings and I have become the patriarchs and matriarchs of the family. I will mail a package of cookies to those who were closest to my father, to thank them for giving him so much support after he'd had his stroke. In a way, they were better children to him than I was, because they were closer, whereas I had to close my business down and travel the length of a continent to spend time with him for a week or two every season. It was they, not I, who saw to most of his daily needs, and for that I am grateful.
Finally the cookies are all formed and on the sheets, a hundred and twenty of them, waiting to stale for the requisite twelve hours. It has taken me three hours to get it all done, including the wash-up of the bowls. Every year, I think that this might be the last year I do this. It's a lot of trouble, after all. But it's still the best way I have for connecting to my family, and to my past, and to the ghosts who have gone on before. I am painfully aware now, as I never was when I was younger, that soon I will be part of that past; my own images and writings and perhaps a few guitars and mandolins will be all that survive me. My presence, like my family pictures, will crack and fade. Children unborn will look at those pictures and wonder who I might have been. I'm still trying to find that out myself. And that's a good thing, because it means that the journey isn't over yet.


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