Carol Malkin

The Recluse In Our Family

By 4 Comments

My grandmother was a recluse.

For much of her middle and later years, she lived in a dilapidated house with my grandfather, and then alone after he passed away. Months went by before she’d bathe or change her clothes, and then always under duress or threat of another hospitalization. She was deep in her illness by the time I became aware that she was different from what my friends’ Mom-Moms were like.

Scan4

As you can imagine, visiting my grandparents was a disturbing experience. There were no warm hugs, offers of cookies, or questions about school. Each week my mother brought her food, and my sister and I, forced to accompany her, would try hard not to touch anything.

Every few years a family member, usually my mother, arrived at her doorstep with a few of Philadelphia’s finest and off my grandmother went, kicking and screaming, for “treatment.”  [Read more…]

Whatever You Do, Work Heartily

By Leave a Comment

This week’s post is by guest blogger, Lanny Larcinese. This essay was the first place winner from One Person One — Lower Merion essay contest and published online in the Main Line Times. It is an excerpt from his work-in-progress memoir, “The Trouble With Women (Or Is It Me?)”. Lannypicture1

Many decades ago, my family owned a restaurant in Detroit where I grew up. Periodically, my maternal grandparents visited for extended periods. Directly from central casting, they were working class people with thick Italian accents and all the skills needed for la dolce vita. Usually, Granddad helped my father with some project or other, while my grandmother cooked homemade pasta and bread, picked dandelion for salad from the grassy berm in the middle of East Outer Drive, or made liquor in mason jars with fresh fruit marinating in moonshine that Dad’s detective friends had commandeered from the evidence room.

[Read more…]

Mom, Meatballs, and Memories

By 4 Comments

A black cardboard cover, its edges frayed. Wide strips of yellowed masking tape wound vertically around the inside front cover securing the torn flyleaf. My mother’s cookbook found me as we cleared out her closet after the funeral.

Mom's recipe book outside (1)

It was a small three-ringed binder. The front page, still a vivid pink, bore my mother’s name and the address and phone number of the house I lived in briefly as an infant. Her handwriting, neat and deliberate, not the hurried scribble I tried to duplicate as a teenager looking for absolution. From that address, I infer that the book had been printed no later than the 1950’s.

It was an All American Loose Leaf Index with accompanying blank matrix for noting a student’s weekly class schedule, including Saturday. My mother hadn’t gone to college, so had this been in her possession since high school? The page was blank—each corresponding square of the class schedule x’d out in a moment of declaration, or, perhaps, a silent lament that her formal education had ended too early.

[Read more…]

Hoarders, Collectors, and The Good Stuff

By 4 Comments

A few months ago, my husband and I visited an acquaintance who owned thirty cut glass decanters, each one artfully arranged on his dining room buffet. Though he prepared an exquisite meal for us, we were unable to enjoy it in the dining room, as the table was piled a foot high with fine linens and coffee table books on Italian Renaissance architecture.

We were able to carve out space at the kitchen counter, though just barely, as hundreds of never-read cookbooks surrounded us in every nook and cranny. I would have gladly chosen to relieve him of a few, but, alas, I was not asked to. There was nary a horizontal surface in the entire house that was not turned into a spectacular tableau of china, sculpture, vases, and books.

What was driving the insatiable desire of this lovely and erudite man to own the finest of everything?

[Read more…]

Surviving Adolescents

By 5 Comments

My daughter is the mother of a toddler, my first grandson. I am fortunate to reside only two hours away and visit frequently. On the playground, she has introduced me to many of her friends with similarly aged children. A clutch of mothers, we watch the toddlers circle each other, babbling in earnest at the wonders around them, or perhaps complaining about that morning’s breakfast. Who’s to know?
Myles at Window - Carol Malkin, Treading Water BlogSparks of rebellion are evident even at their tender age. Refusal to leave the swings. Adamancy about not sharing a cookie. No, not a cookie. Not in this neighborhood. An organic pressed rice cake.

[Read more…]

The Smart One Went First

By Leave a Comment

 

Even five years out, you still come home and want to shout “GI-RLS, in that sing-song voice and then do that “psst psst” thing that let you pretend it was a secret message between the three of you.

Back then they rarely came slinking down the steps at your hopeful call. You knew they’d be splayed on their bed—the one you slept in also, eyeing you from upturned heads that might rotate in disinterested greeting.

It took a while, but you finally noticed they stopped jumping up to things—chairs, tables, and then the bed. Just stayed on the ground and looked up mournfully, giving you a mouthful of injustice and demands. You never noticed the smell. Not until they were long gone and you’d been away for a while, cleansing your sinuses in non-feline tricked-out spaces.

[Read more…]

The Help

By 31 Comments

I grew up in the least diverse section of Philadelphia and I was raised by a African American nanny. But this is no rich, privileged girl story.

Frances was a part of my childhood almost since I was born. Three days a week, she arrived in our house early in the morning and stayed until my mother got home from work. She cleaned the house, ironed my father’s shirts, and cooked better than anything my mother could do on an entire Sunday. Don’t ask about the other two days. A revolving disappointment, if you asked my mother.

I’d come home from school and the kitchen would be filled with the aroma of fried chicken and the creamiest macaroni and cheese you ever tasted. Her meatloaf had a hard-boiled egg buried in the middle that we three kids fought over like the Cracker Jack prize. And her iced tea—a cup of sugar to a pitcher, she said, and we drank it by the gallon. She loved the daytime stories and the numbers and often came to work with her dream book, giddy with her winnings. She was a window into another world and I was enthralled.

[Read more…]