Kitchen Conversations

I grew up with my maternal grandmother. She worked nearby as a receptionist, and she would come home at lunchtime. My mother was a writer; she worked mornings in her bedroom up on the second floor. When she heard the front door open, my mother would stop her typing. She’d walk downstairs, past the paper bags of groceries my grandmother would have just placed on the kitchen counters, and begin to talk.

There is a vignette locked in my memory: my grandmother is washing the dishes with her coat still on, and my mother is at the kitchen table, talking. My mother would talk about anyone had seen recently, anything she had heard or read, family, friends, acquaintances, strangers. The content was ordinary; it was the act of conversation that nourished them both.

My kitchen is now hundreds of miles from the one my mother inhabits, but for many years my mother and I had those “kitchen conversations” over the phone. We’d talk about friends, family, anything we’ve seen or read or heard . . . until recently.

I called my mother today. “Mom, you’ll never believe this – I was at a potluck, and someone there was from our town! She lived there the whole time I was growing up; her son was the valedictorian of my class!”

“I can’t believe that,” my mother says in a dry voice. She really can’t. It is as if I told her that toads were flying through my kitchen window.

I add details, hoping to spark the interest and reciprocity that, a few months ago, would have been her natural response. But everything I say just seems to irritate her.

I remember my last “kitchen conversation” with my grandmother. I had just been to the grocery store, where the woman in line ahead had darted back to the shelf to pick up a chocolate bar. “Is it that good?” I asked. “Oh my,” she said with conviction. “Dark chocolate with hazelnuts. Taste it and you see God.”

So I bought one. I brought it back to my grandmother’s apartment, and she, and my great-aunt, and my eight year-old son and I all sat around the table, and we listened to stories. We heard about buying the first car in the neighborhood, about driving to the country to buy black-eyed susies, about walking the girders of the tenements at my great-grandfather’s construction site. . . All the while, we nibbled at the chocolate, and the woman in the grocery store was right.

I am lucky that my last conversation with my grandmother and great-aunt was like that, and my son is lucky to have been there. But we can’t pick our “lasts.”

It is sad to me that I can no longer talk to my mother the way I used to, that the radio signal of her soul can no longer get through the damaged equipment. Still, I am glad for the thousands of hours of conversation we did have. In a way, she, and my grandmother, and my great-aunt, all the generations of women and children everywhere are present, every time I begin a conversation over the dishes.

One of my favorite times in the week is when I come home from work loaded with groceries. My teen-aged son comes sniffing around to see what he can immediately consume. And, sometimes even before his mouth is full, he asks, “How was your day?”