Where Memories Are Born & Reborn

I grew up in an sleepy lakeside tourist town, the kind that is absolutely dead in the winter except for smatterings of ice fishing huts across the lake and teeming with life in the summer because city people love to escape to places with jet skis, t-shirt shops, and novelty fudge. If you've ever lived in this kind of place, you know exactly what I'm talking about; if you haven't, you've probably visited such a place and can't quite wrap your brain around it when I tell you that only 5,000 people actually live there. 

It was an exceptionally boring place to grow up, except that somehow it wasn't. Small towns can be full of a strange magic — born, I expect, out of that very boredom — and that makes them equal parts enticing and dangerous. And because tourist towns are playgrounds for the wealthy, you can grow up a poor kid on a 40-acre estate like I did because estates are living, breathing plots of land that need 24/7 maintenance, and that requires a live-in job like the one my father had for the first 18 years of my life.

That estate is where I developed the relationship with food that I have today. In the summer, I knew when the plums in the orchard would be perfectly ripe, and in the fall I'd pick grapes by the basket and watch my best friend's mom, the housekeeper, turn them into jams. We'd get strawberries from the farmer's market and she'd make them into sweet pierogis for us to snack on, and every summer there were endless vegetables in the garden to pull and sneak a nibble of to see how they tasted. 

For a number of years when I was very small, there were farm-fresh eggs that my parents' best friend Allen would bring by every couple of weeks. I called them "strawberry eggs," and I don't know why exactly, but they were huge and impossibly fresh, almost sweet in nature. The eggs stopped coming after Allen was sent to a mental institution for almost a decade. He had woken up one morning, thrown his half-asleep wife into the back of their van, and driven down the highway in the wrong direction until he crashed into and killed another driver. When he regained consciousness after the crash, he had no recollection of what he'd done, and doctors later found that he'd had a chemical imbalance in his brain.

As a child, it was a scary story to know, but even then I don't remember feeling scared of him. It was just one of myriad weird, inexplicable things that happened to us. There were so many of them that I found myself in later years having to ask my parents to confirm if all my memories were real (to date, they always have been). When I last saw Allen, I had just turned 18 and was working at the corner deli the summer before I moved away for college. I didn't recognize him, of course, but he heard someone call me by name and approached me. "You loved those eggs fresh from the farm," he said, and immediately I knew who he was, because that's how food and friends work: They're imprinted on your brain for life.

He seemed well, or at least as well as someone who’d spent years reckoning with his own brain having turned on him could be. I urged him to call my parents. “They really miss you,” I said. He wouldn’t call, just as he hadn’t in the years prior, but I think we are all still hoping he will someday. On that morning, he lost the person he had known himself to be, and part of the cost was that he also gave up the people who knew that person.

A couple of weeks ago, I received a package in the mail: a belated Christmas gift from my mom. It contained her pocket watch, the one thing of "value" she owns that she's always said will be my inheritance. (I use the word “value” in quotes here because it is, to us, a family heirloom, but if I had to guess it’s probably worth a couple hundred bucks.) I’ve been begging her for it for years, and in a year where we couldn’t be together in person and in which she’d lost her own mother, I think she finally saw a reason to pass it down while she’s still alive and we can celebrate it together. Forty-some years ago, she got that pocket watch as a gift from Allen, and now it is mine. I'll keep it alongside all of my memories of my should-have-been-boring childhood. To date, whenever I fry eggs — which I now get delivered to my home fresh from a farm upstate, sunny and almost sweet in nature — I think about Allen, and I hope that wherever he is in the world he's found some peace.

In his honor, and in honor of a world that's certainly no less weird by the day in the present, I can't recommend this green shakshuka from the New York Times highly enough. Your body and your mind will be grateful for a dose of hearty greens in the guise of comfort food. 

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You’re reading “Soup and Despair,” a weekly newsletter by Sarah Flynn and Rebecca Orchant. It’s about food, feelings, and surviving the dark times. If someone forwarded you this email, it’s because they love you and they want you to eat. You can subscribe to it too!