October 27, 2015 – I’m still his little girl

Listen to this post:

Last week my parents came for dinner on my mom’s birthday. My dad had not heard or read my post – my birthday ode to her, so I played the recording for us all to hear. After it played, I had the feeling that the teeter-totter had been left with someone hanging up in the air – it needed to be balanced out. Life is a mixed bag – we all have challenges and blessings in our lives. On the blessings side of my life, are the two people I was born to. I scored in the parents department – and today I want to tell you all about my dad, my Papa.

When I talk about my dad, I say that he is gifted with teaching, with preparing food, with growing things and taking care of his kids. He’s also a storehouse of knowledge, especially about the natural world. He has planted an enormous, organic vegetable garden every summer of my life. He’s the cook in our family (Mama is the baker), and it is from him that I got my obsession with learning and knowing – when we don’t know we must look it up. Google was invented for my dad – and me!

He was born James Joseph Brown to working class parents: Joe and Marge (Margaret) Brown. My grandma was an identical twin, and she and her sister Helen were pregnant with boys at the same time. She told me they were a sight walking down the streets of San Francisco together, identical faces and big bellies! He and his cousin Curt were born 6 weeks apart, and each were only children – it was the depression and people weren’t having a lot of kids. When I was once preparing a talk about my history with food and cooking, I asked my dad how a city kid got so interested in growing food, and he told me this story: “From my Uncle Dick in Fresno, I was probably 7 years old, I can’t remember if I was staying with him or with my grandparents, and visiting his house nearby. He and I prepared a little plot of land in his backyard and planted some radish seeds. They germinated and started growing and I then had to go back home to San Francisco. A few weeks later, I got a package in the mail. My uncle had harvested the radishes and sent them to me.” His voice had a catch of emotion, as he remembered his uncle and receiving those radishes.

My dad is a renaissance man. He was a Marine during the Korean War, but also was and is interested in everything – food and cooking, but also classical music and opera. He is an artist – he did some oil paintings and later became a ceramics artist and teacher. He took two bare plots of land – around the two houses my family has lived in – and built beautiful landscapes – of stone and wood and exposed aggregate. He worked the soil and then planted trees and shrubs, fruit orchards and of course the vegetable gardens. He loves to read – especially stories. I remember him reading aloud short stories like “The Cask of Amantillado” at the dinner table after we finished eating.

My memories of my dad when I was a younger child, include him with a carpenter’s pencil behind his ear as he built decks and fences around our house, going to the ceramics classroom with him on the weekends and getting to play with the clay, having “Dr. Brown” patch up stubbed toes and skinned knees (it wasn’t Mama who tended to our boo-boo’s!). But most of my memories are with him in the kitchen. Mama went to work when I was in junior high and Dad took over the cooking. He was a high school teacher then. So after school each day, he went grocery shopping and when he got home, he and I made dinner every night – until I went away to college. I distinctly remember him teaching me how to cut up a chicken, how to dice an onion, and how to mince with a chef’s knife. It became second nature for the two of us to cook together. Mama tells me that I’d correct her – when she was doing something differently than Dad did, I’d say “Dad doesn’t do it that way…” These days he doesn’t have as much energy and sometimes he’ll ask me what he can do to help – when I cook for our family out at their house. He trained me well and all those meals we prepared together made me a skilled, confident and creative cook – one of the things that I’m most grateful for in my life.

Several years ago we had the idea for the two of us to write a cookbook together. We thought we’d call it “Sunday Night at the Browns” – a menu cookbook of the recipes from our family’s Sunday dinners. Along the way, we’d record a year in the vegetable garden, to capture all the wisdom and experience in Dad’s head – and have it include our artwork. We started it long enough ago that I said that it’d be great to finish it by the time he was 80 and I was 50. We’ve passed those two marks by 4 years. The other “projects” I’m involved in have pulled me away. But lately it has been really nagging at me that we’ve let it go. We have an outline and a list of recipes. I know that getting it going again mostly lies in my lap, as I’m the writer between us. So, I’m telling you all about it, in hopes that making it public, I’ll carve out the time to make it a reality. It would be such a testament to the bond we share.

There’s another very tender way in which I’m connected to my Papa. As the only girl in the family, it followed that I was Daddy’s girl. He used to sing to me “Soliloquy” from the musical “Carousel.” “My little girl, pink and white, as peaches and cream is she…” And “Cara Mia My” by Jay and the Americans. I was embarrassed by the attention and used to brush him off. I realize now how sweet it was that he sang to me and I feel sorry – for both of us – that I wasn’t able to just bask in his love. Not that long ago, I was having some energy-body work, which tapped into my feeling the old fears of being such a sick baby. In the middle of this I had a not-quite-memory, but more a felt-sense of my soft little toddler body, being held by my dad’s young, strong masculine body. I felt his solidness, the safety of being held close to him. When I shared this with him, he told me that it actually happened. He told me he’d put on music and pick me up and dance around the room with me – his little girl.

That solid and safe love is there in every hug, hello or goodbye. Even when we say goodbye on the phone – his love is in the timbre of his voice. If Mama is the energy – the sun – in our family, my Papa is the center of gravity – the earth, life-generating, healing, understanding, steadfast. He’s had some health challenges the past few years, which have had me start to worry about how much longer we’re going to have him here. He told my hubby a few days ago that he needed to talk to me – to tell me that it’s not yet time to worry – that he’ll tell me when it is. Ok, Papa, I’m not worrying. So let’s get cooking on that cookbook!

Because, I love you so much!

Cari (my family name)