When the rain is cold

 

I love old ladies. Because they are so easy to please. Just take care of them, love them, and work your butt off for them. Use some racy humor. Be mostly honest about yourself. They probably don’t understand us developmentally arrested boys of Generation X, or the movie “Fight Club.” But when you love them and take care of them, they love you because you work for them, and they will love you forever. And they deserve it all.

It was only once that I acted like an adult and cooked a duck dinner for a girl. You learn your mistakes. Or you make your mistakes and without learning from them you proceed onward. Maybe you never let it go.

That was mid-autumn in the cold and rain in this particular girl’s slummy apartment on Lyndale and Franklin downtown, near my own quaint place on Franklin and 1st downtown.

The recipe was from my father, from either during the duck hunt itself or from a phone call, and the duck was a hen mallard from that very same duck hunt. The recipe, which I have forgotten and been reminded of many times since, went like this:

The plucked roasting mallard is stuffed with salt and pepper and butter and onions and apples – and I remember that I had mistakenly used a soft, sweet apple, not a cooking apple. The skin is rubbed and puffed with butter and salt and pepper, and all together it is roasted in a medium hot oven (I think) for an hour or an hour and a half (I can’t remember).

And I made a poor man’s apple pie – though it should be called a rich man’s – which consisted of sliced apples settled in a greased baking pan and topped with cookie dough and baked. Delicious.

If you wanted to put yourself out there – to make yourself really vulnerable – take your girl on your – what? – second or third date to meet your grandmother. When you are a young man and starting to live your own life, on a drizzly night in the fall, when the rain is cold, in the dark and you pick up the girl, whose name let’s say was Christine, at her widowed mother’s house in the suburbs – and oh! the mom was very nice and encouraging and respectful. I wasn’t sure if she had the right guy in the entryway.

Then you drive to another house in another suburb in the dark and rain, and if you were like me, you had no love of those places except that they grew good women and except there my grandmother had always been, and at my age then I thought would always be. Living in this home, when my father was elsewhere very far away and my mother, too, was very, very far away, and elsewhere.

I could’ve done better for my grandmother at that home. Inside her house that she’d made and raised five children in on her own. Now she was alone in the fall watching the dead leaves gather in the yard. That neighborhood was elms and red maples and crabs and green ash.

Alone in the winter watching the snow fall through the window and feeling snowbound. Watching the grass grow long in the spring and summer. Waiting for one me to come over. Sometimes I never came. And then most of the time I never came.

Oh, how we pulled up with my grandmother looking out the great living room window! And oh! How surprised and happy she was to see me, as always, and so infrequently in my young adulthood. And oh, how polite to my girlfriend and so suspicious of her because my grandmother never trusted girls, she was so suspicious of girls, girls were only trouble.

But how much I wish I could tell you what, what a cherub was Christine. And if only my grandmother new what a bad boy I was in those days.

So, I tried to tell my old grandmother the truth then. With some racy humor.

“Well, we’ll see you later,” I said, standing up and taking Christine’s wonderful hand. “We’re going to make out in the driveway now.”

And Christine blushed and rolled her eyes (but followed me nonetheless) and my grandmother of course pretended seriousness and pointed her finger at me. And we laughed all together.

Gee, for those dark, wet, cold nights again. To make it clear to my grandmother who I was really, and to make it clear to Christine who she was, really and truly, forever.