Love is Served

As a child, every year at just about this time, my mother, sisters, and I would pack up for a couple of months back in Decatur, Illinois visiting our family. And in a time before the internet, Facetime, emails, even really a good solid telephone connection from behind the Iron Curtain in Moscow (yes, I’m that old), it was almost like going home to visit strangers. And beyond the relatives we reconnected with, there was a brief, fleeting absorption of all things American and pop culture related and shopping for new clothes and catching up on cartoons and the latest junk food. We soaked up America. So much to pack in to a very brief time.

We’d land at Chicago O’Hare, surprised by the endless cornfields abutting suburbia with its backyard swimming pools, our plane’s shadow chasing us on the deep waters of Lake Michigan. Even as the wheels of the plane skidded on the runway, I immediately was struck by how big the cars were (yes, it was the 80s). At that time the immigration hall at the airport was a giant room surrounded by a glass viewing deck on the level above us. While waiting for our passports to be stamped, my sisters and I would search the faces in the crowds for my grandparents. We’d wave furiously. In hindsight, it must have been almost stranger for them to see us as we surely changed in that year’s absence much more than they had.

In a giant Cadillac, through the flat fields of corn and soybeans, we traveled four hours south to our hometown. We’d come home. And throughout those couple of months we’d visit with cousins, have watermelon seed spitting competitions, have burgers on the grill with supermarket potato salad and coleslaw, catch fireflies, and gawk at the over-abundance in the stores. Most of my days were spent at the South Side Country Club taking tennis lessons in the mornings and swimming until my fingers pruned and my skin turned pink in the afternoons. I’d eat a grilled cheese and drink a lemonade every day for lunch at the snack bar. My Aunt Pat and I would catch up while shaping hamburgers and drinking sun tea. My Aunt Judy would make her delicious BBQ and laugh her big laugh.  Grandma Mary served us her layered salad and rainbow sherbet. Great Aunt Hazel made chilli topped with cheddar cheese and oyster crackers. There were Sundays in Chatham at my Great Grandma Ethel’s when she’d make fried chicken and mashed potatoes and the best green beans you’ve ever tasted. Friday nights called for blackened catfish, twice baked potatoes, and wedge salads with thick blue cheese dressing and bacon bits. We were fussed over and passed from relative to relative until it was time to go back to wherever home was. This was home but it wasn’t.

For years I struggled with this idea of home, suffering the cruelty of kids who made fun of me for my weird indistinct European accent and unique taste in clothes. Growing up abroad before the internet, I wasn’t up on the latest trends or pop culture references. I was simultaneously worldly and yet incredibly sheltered. When I started at Barnard College in New York City at just 17, I felt terrifically unprepared for the world, surrounded by my sophisticated classmates with their New York Times tucked into their satchels and drinking to-go coffees in class. In all of the years I spent living in America, from college into my mid-30s, I never felt I belonged in the US. Somehow being American, even living in America’s most cosmopolitan cities, but having my unusual multi-cultural upbringing made me feel like more of an outsider than I had living in cultures that were very far from my own. I made efforts to adjust and fit myself into what I thought an “American” was, but despite my attempts at reinvention, always ended up far from my true self. Recently I heard someone say that the opposite of belonging is fitting in. I spent years trying to fit in because I didn’t belong. 

Once I moved back across the Atlantic at the age of 36 my whole being exhaled and I found my place again. Apparently I was someone who would have to be American from afar. No longer out of place, no longer struggling to fit in, I suddenly just belonged. And it was from here that I got to experience homecoming again, like I had as a child, visiting my parents in the summer because that’s the America I knew and understood. My mother would fuss over me, asking me what I’d like to do, what food she should fix me (never mind that she was in treatment for ovarian cancer). We’d go to farmers’ markets together and the movies and Barnes and Noble. Lots and lots of lunches out and window shopping together.

When I married my husband I inherited a whole new homecoming extravaganza. When we were landing for the first time in Amman, Jordan, for our wedding, I remember saying to my parents I felt much like I did when I used to go to summer camp in the US. I was excited, anticipatory, terrified, and unsure all at once. In a gesture of extreme politeness all of the men in my to-be husband’s family came to greet us at the airport and bring us back to their home where a large feast had been laid on in spite of the late hour. It was here for the first time that I witnessed the cultural mores and traditions that I hadn’t realised were going to become part of my life but soon were. My husband’s parent’s home was brimming with dozens of people (I was told it was only the immediate family) and so I smiled and watched and tried desperately to remember names and histories as they were told to me. The many Aunties lined the staircase going up to the house, they hugged me and whispered approval among themselves that I could pass as Circassian.

On successive visits to my in-laws in Jordan, Ghazi’s mother, Auntie Suzanne, would always ask him before we arrived what we’d like to eat for our homecoming. Koosa mashee or mulukhiyah or malfoof or makloobe? Quickly I learned what each of these dishes were: stuffed zucchini, jew’s mallow stew with chicken, stuffed cabbage leaves, layers of rice and meat and vegetables flipped upside-down (and how to make them), eagerly anticipating our trips to the white city in the desert filled with family and friends and really delicious food. Not subtly, my mother-in-law would ask me what dishes I prepared for Ghazi when he returned from trips. I’d mention some of my standard dishes.  “You don’t cook rice?” she asked incredulously. Truth be told, I didn’t cook much rice, wasn’t even very good at cooking rice. It was a moral failing in her book. I didn’t have a standard roster of dishes like she did, often just cooking whatever was around and tasty at the moment.

On my way back to Beirut in the early summer last year, I was sitting on a plane full of moms and their kids heading back to Lebanon to visit their families for the season. Their excitement palpable, kids spinning like tops in their small seats after hours of traveling, anticipating that embrace of extended family they’d missed all year. Long ago, I had been one of them, just heading the other way across the Atlantic. And it struck me, listening to their conversations among one another,  that these Lebanese Americans were so much more American that I was! They knew more about America and daily life, what shows were on TV and specials running at the chain restaurants. Similarly, l had experienced more of what it was like to live in today’s Lebanon than they had, the state of disarray and lack of electricity, medicine, gasoline. I mulled over this idea of identity and place while we flew over Syria, then the snowcapped mountains of Lebanon, banking over the Mediterranean until the spectacular Beirut skyline emerged from the haze.  I was sure their mothers had asked them what they’d like to have when they arrived. I was sure they were looking forward to the beautiful peaches and apricots and baladi tomatoes and manaooshe at their local furns (ovens). I was jealous of their impending homecomings.

I desperately miss my mother’s fussing and those homecomings to America in the summer (I suppose that’s obvious by now). And I think what I’ve come to realise is that I’m the bearer of homecoming traditions now. In creating lovely homecomings for Ghazi I’m somehow taking on her lovely graciousness. My mother has been gone many years now, but I know that these rituals of homecoming, preparing a special meal to celebrate your return, to say I love you, are sacred.  She’d have the house spruced up, sheets ironed on the bed, roses from their garden on the table, day trips planned, good conversations to be had. Is there anything more precious?

Auntie Suzanne still asks us what we’d like to eat when we come to visit and fusses over us. We’re still surrounded by hordes of family and friends whenever we go and I suddenly feel very much at home whenever we visit, part of them. I belong. I try to learn as much as I can in the kitchen from these women who are now part of my life so that I can carry their culinary traditions on in our home, give Ghazi a taste of his home when we are so far from it. For me it’s those tastes of homecoming that bring me such comfort and a sense of my place in this big, troubled world. A plate of koosa mashee or my Aunt Judy’s BBQ and my troubles slip away and I’m enveloped in that sense of home that isn’t really home but somehow, that’s just fine.