The Flag Case

©2013 by John LaTorre

  

When my father, a veteran of World War II, was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in 2005, my family was presented with the flag used in the ceremony.  It was entrusted to the care of my nephew, Bill Rossiter, who has it in his home in Florida.   

My sister Anne called me about a year ago and gave me a suggestion: make a case for the flag as a birthday present to her and Bill (who is her son).  I pointed out that cases could be purchased for around forty dollars, and would probably be better than any I could make with my journeyman woodworking skills. But she eventually convinced me that the personal touch meant everything to her, and I agreed to the project.

I got the measurements I needed and went shopping for wood at our local hardwood emporium, and that’s where I hit my first snag. There were a lot of choices, ranging from walnut to exotic woods with names like cocobolo and zebrawood. Red oak seemed a good choice at first, but I felt that my sister would want something a little more traditional, like walnut or cherry. I found myself asking, “What kind of a man was my father? What would he have liked? Was he a walnut sort of fellow, or an oak guy, or a cherry guy?” The answer was obvious. He was a cheap wood guy. If he’d made that case, he would have used pine or poplar, or even plywood scraps left over from another project. But Anne would have hit the roof if I’d used those. That was my first epiphany: I wasn’t making the case for my father, but for my family. So plywood was out.

I rooted through the bins and came up with a piece of walnut with a good grain and no bends or twist to it, a sign that the wood was stable and would probably stay that way for a long time. Walnut is an honest wood, not very expensive and capable of a warm finish. Dad wouldn’t have minded that. So the board went home with me.

My second epiphany came when I began sawing and machining the pieces into shape. I have to explain at this point that when my father undertook projects like this, the results were always functional but sometimes not very pretty. Our house was full of little gadgets like this. They were ugly, but they worked, and that was all that counted with my father. My brother Joe coined the perfect term for these curious artifacts. We called them “daddifacts.”

It wasn’t until much later that I realized that the daddifacts were an outward expression of his philosophy of life, derived from the only sport that he pursued throughout most of his adult life. Dad was a golfer, and tried to teach me the game, but it really wasn’t my sort of game. But I did learn the golfer’s Prime Directive: Play It As It Lays. Any golf shot results in the ball resting in a specific location, seldom an optimum location. You can’t improve the lie of the ball, or move it a few feet to one side or another (except in special circumstances), without incurring a penalty, and the point is not to try to. Instead, you got out of your predicament by, say, hitting the ball back onto the fairway where you have a chance of salvaging your score with a clean shot to the pin.

The same principle applied to his craftsmanship. If a piece came out a little wrong – lopsided, or slightly cracked or splintered – but it didn’t interfere with the utility of the finished object, he let it slide. If it needed paint, he’d use some of the stuff he already had on his shelf, regardless of the color, rather than go out to the store to buy more. If it broke, but a bit of glue put it back in operation, he made no effort to hide the glue line. Every daddifact told the story: “This is what you’ve got. It will work. Accept it.”

Nowhere did my father illustrate that philosophy better than his recovery after a devastating stroke he suffered in 2003. Dad loved to walk, and it took away his sense of balance. He loved to talk, and it took his speech. He loved to eat, and it impaired his ability to swallow. And he loved to read, and it damaged the part of his brain that processed the written word.

Dad would certainly have been entitled to be bitter at this fate, but he never showed it. Instead, he applied himself to regaining enough of his strength and balance to graduate from a wheelchair to a walker. After months of speech therapy, he was able to make himself understood even to strangers. After a year, he trained himself to eat solid food and drink unthickened liquids without choking. And, most important to him, he learned to read again, training a different portion of his brain to substitute for the damaged areas. And he did all this at the age of eighty-eight. If a second, even more destructive stroke hadn’t hit him a month before his eighty-ninth birthday and rendered him brain-dead, I’m sure he would have continued to improve. I still dream about him, and in my dreams, he’s walking again, unsteadily but confidently, waving my arm away.

I realize now that he was applying his golf philosophy to his recovery. He resigned himself to what he had lost, discovered what he had left, and figured out how to use it to get back into the game. He was playing it as it lay, one shot at a time.

So when I built the flag case, I wasn’t too worried about how it turned out.  As it happened, it went together pretty well and doesn’t look bad. But if you look closely enough, you’ll spot an imperfection here and there. I could have worked to eliminate it, or simply started over with more wood, but somehow I felt that my father’s memory would be better honored if I just soldiered through, accepted the flaw, and kept plugging along … in other words, if I just played it as it lay.

Nativity Set

Copyright 2009, 2013 by John LaTorre

At a garage sale the other day, I noticed a Nativity set (also called a “creche set”) on a table. For those who are unacquainted with the term, let me explain that a creche set is a collection of statues which represent the participants at the first Christmas. There are always figures of Joseph, Mary, and the infant Jesus; the more complete assortments also include one or more angels, a shepherd or two, the three Wise Men, and various livestock like sheep, cows, and camels. These figures are used as Christmas decorations in Catholic households and, like the other decorations, are usually set up on the first Sunday in Advent and taken down after the Feast of the Epiphany, wrapped in paper, and stored away with the other decorations until the next Christmas season.

I noticed that this set had no price tag and, even at the closing of the sale, no customers. When I asked the salespeople what would happen to it, they told me that everything that wasn't sold was going into a dumpster. Being the sentimentalist that I am, I took the set to donate to a Catholic church in the neighborhood, in the hope that the set would find its way to some family who would find it as fascinating as I did when I was small.

Our own family always displayed a creche scene at Christmastime, eventually acquiring a genuine Hummel collection when we were stationed in Germany for a while. Like most families, we would set the figures of Mary, Joseph, and the empty manger out at the beginning of the season, and add the figurine for the baby Jesus on Christmas Eve. In Catholic families, this is traditionally done by the youngest child in the family, which was me until I was eleven. Then my sister came along, and it was her turn. I remember adding my own variation: while the creche set was set up on one side of the living room, we would put the shepherds and their sheep on the other side, and these would not be added to the main collection until Christmas Day.

This variation was probably inspired by another tradition we had. The figures of the three Wise Men were put up in the most distant place in the house from the living room. On Christmas Day, they were moved a twelfth of the way to the creche. Every day thereafter, they traveled a little further through our house, until they arrived at the manger on January 6. (I seem to recall that my siblings and I took turns moving the company a little each day.) It was my mother's way of dramatizing the Christmas story, I think, and of allowing us children an opportunity to participate in it. As far as I know, our family is the only one who practiced this particular ritual, although Mom may have heard of it from somebody.

There isn't much room in my life for a creche set anymore, but I hope that the family who ends up with my garage sale acquisition ends up with the same warm memories I had of our set, and finds their own way to commemorate the Christmas season. It's a perfectly good set – all the major characters are there, all in suitably devout poses. With a little luck, it can serve a number of families for a long, long time.

Aromatherapy, Italian Style

Copyright 2013 by John LaTorre

I made my "bones" today.

No, I didn't whack anybody at the behest of some Mafia don. Instead, I made a sort of cookie called the "ossi di morte," or the "bones of the dead," which my family used to make every Christmas. "Bones" are small white cookies made of a dough that is rolled out into long strings about a half an inch thick and cut into segments about an inch or two long. 

When they are baked, the little cylinders rupture and the insides spill out, leaving the cookies hollow. 

 

I used to work in a factory in Salinas, California, which had a number of Hispanic workers. I made the bones every Christmas, as I do now, and brought them to work. The Anglos at the shop thought that cookies resembling bones was a bit too macabre for Christmas, but the Latinos were totally down with it, coming from a culture that celebrates the Dia de los Muertos by baking little skull-shaped cakes and cookies.

I think I'm the only one in my family that still makes them on a regular basis anymore. And that's about the only tradition in Italian cooking that I'm still preserving. For instance, I haven't made tomato sauce from scratch in over forty years. It's been years since I've even tasted any. My mother stopped making it when the premium canned tomato sauces like Ragu appeared in supermarket shelves, claiming that it was as good as the stuff she made. That could be true, because my mother was of Irish and English extraction, and learned to make tomato sauce only after being married to my Italian father. So her redaction of the family recipes she was given by her sisters-in-law might have left something to be desired. I'll never know, since all my father's sisters have passed away, and their daughters and sons have probably given up home-made tomato sauce for the store-bought variety, as I have.

It may be just as well. I remember my Aunt Anna cooking tomato sauce from scratch. She was a heavy smoker, and always had a cigarette in her mouth. She would keep up an incessant line of chatter as she stirred the pot, the end of her cigarette bouncing up and down as she muttered, and occasionally the ash would shake loose from its moorings and fall into the pot. Being a child at the time, I took this to be part of the natural course of events and thought nothing of it. The sauce was excellent, but whether this was due to that secret ingredient is something I'll never know.

Which reminds me of another thing: my aunts all spoke Italian before they could speak English, but I seldom heard them speaking that language, except in three instances. The first was, of course, when they when they spoke in the presence of members of our generation, who could speak only a few words of Italian. That usually clued us to the fact that they were speaking about something they didn't want us to know about. What they didn't realize was that, while we couldn't speak the language, we ended up understanding a great deal more than they suspected, so the ruse was not as effective as they thought it was.

The second instance was in those infrequent times when they swore. These were all God-fearing ladies, and curse words seldom escaped their lips. But when the hot fat spattered them or they dropped a dish onto the floor or my cousins and I had finally pushed them to the breaking point by our shenanigans, they would swear, and they would usually swear in Italian. Maybe it was because profanity was much more expressive in Italian than in English, and more capable of conveying the distress of the heart. Or maybe it was because God Himself was thought to be Italian, and the theory was that He would be more sympathetic to profanity expressed in His native language, in the hopes He would give a fellow paisano a break. We knew that God was Italian, of course, because the Popes were always Italian back in those times.

The third instance was when they were talking about food and cooking. I would overhear two of my aunts talking in the kitchen. They'd start in English, mainly, with something like: "Do you remember how Mama used to make the cannoli? I think she used ..." and when listing the ingredients, the language would slide into Italian, using the terms my grandmother herself used. By the time they were talking about the actual cooking process, they'd be speaking almost entirely in Italian, that being the proper language for speaking of the culinary arts, just as French would be the proper language for ballet, or Hebrew would be the proper language of the synagogue.

I don't know if anybody has commented on this before, but I believe that the Italians invented aromatherapy. If there was any great distress in the house, like a death, or a sickness, or the prospect that any family member might end up marrying a non-Italian, the proper thing to do was to fry up some onions or Italian sausage and perhaps bake some bread. The house would be filled with wonderful aromas, and somehow things didn't seem as dire as they did before. Modern realty agents know this, of course, and make sure that the house they're selling has the aroma of baked bread or even vanilla (which they would paint on the light bulbs so as to release the fragrance when the bulb was turned on). In this way, they would subconsciously telegraph the fact that if you bought this house, somehow everything would turn out just fine.

(I suppose I should add that I was not a witness to the distress caused by my Italian father marrying my Irish/English mother, because I wasn't born at the time. But I was given the story later on. My father's marriage opened the floodgates, though, and by the time my own generation got around to picking spouses, they were non-Italian as often as not. We even started marrying outside our religion, triggering another round of distress in our elders. But my grandmother was very old by then, and probably beyond caring.)

To get back to the subject of cooking, most of my cousins are still quite capable of cooking up a storm when the occasion arises. They've probably preserved many of their parents' recipes, but I don't know if the cuisine plays as large a part of their lives as it did in my childhood, where events like Thanksgiving dinner would routinely pack up to thirty people into a small tract house, with tables set up everywhere there was room. To be sure, there was the traditional turkey and cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes and such, but these dishes would be supplemented by the lasagna and pasta and Italian breads and cannoli and Uncle Santo's home-made red wine and other fare that would have been unthinkable to omit from any respectable family gathering. In the modern age of smaller families, now dispersed throughout the country instead of concentrated in a Central New York city, I doubt if we'll ever see such a congregation again. We can only keep the tradition alive in small, personal ways, as best we can.

I, for example, made my bones today.

(Followup note: I am happy to report that since reading this, my cousins have informed me that tomato sauce is still made from scratch in their households. And I am told that the tomato sauce's secret ingredient was not tobacco but pork.)