Alby - Run, Run, Run

Run, Run, Run

Together with my brother, sister and mother, I ate bagels and made conversation.

“Do you mind that we’re eating in front of you, Dad?” I asked. Alby always had a healthy appetite and enjoyed his food more than most. In fact, we had our own unit of measure with which we could determine how much or little he enjoyed his meal: Dad had a problem with his nose – when he ate good food, it ran and he needed to blow it. Constantly. Restaurants get star ratings, our family meals got blows. Good meal? Four blows, easy. Great meal? Five blows. Exquisite meal? Buy stock in Kleenex. The “Blow Barometer” was at work, no matter where or when he ate.

The first time I cooked for him I was a teenager. My mother had been mildly ill and was resting in bed so I decided to save my father from starvation and make dinner. Short of boiling water, I’d never cooked a meal before that day but had watched my mom enough times. I thought surely I knew what to do and after quite a bit of mixing and mashing, I formed a meatloaf. This ought to be good, Alby loved meatloaf. Funny though, it didn’t look like mom’s and I was surprised at how heavy it felt. Surely some ground beef, lots of bread crumbs, mashed Rice Krispies, ground Corn Flakes, oatmeal and bran buds should taste okay.

I put the meatloaf into a five-hundred degree oven, set the timer for forty-five minutes, poured a pound of spaghetti into boiling water, ripped up a few pieces of unwashed lettuce and cut up a carrot for a tossed salad that I drizzled with about one-fourth of a jar of vegetable oil, and voila!

After about ten minutes I opened all the windows to get rid of the smoke that was pouring from the oven because the exhaust fan wasn’t strong enough to clear the air. Odd how the oven never smoked when mom cooked. The water from the spaghetti was boiling over the top of the pot but that eventually stopped after about thirty minutes when the pasta absorbed all the liquid.

We sat down to eat and I watched my father cut into his slab of meatloaf..I had to replace the regular knife with a serrated-edged steak knife…and he put a generous piece of the meat-and-other-stuff-mixture in his mouth. I continued to watch his nose as he chewed. And chewed. And chewed.

“Delicious,” he said. I thought I saw him struggle to swallow a few times because his face kind of contorted and if I hadn’t known better, I would have thought the contortion was from pain. I still watched and waited for his nose to run. Dry as a pile of dead leaves. He ate another piece and another and another until the slab was gone. He twirled his spaghetti on his fork, putting in mouthful after mouthful, and he didn’t even react when it crunched a little bit. I didn’t know that cooking pasta al dente browned it too.

I didn’t dare eat my own portion because I was too busy willing his nose to run. We didn’t talk, he just ate and I watched. Alby cleaned his plate, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and said, “You did a great job Susie Q, a great job."

I cried. It was the first time in my consciousness that my father lied to me and I knew it as surely as I knew that he looked like he was going to vomit.

“I didn’t do a great job. It was awful and you know it,” I yelled petulantly. “You didn’t blow, not even once. You’re lying, Daddy!”

With that, he reached over to the meatloaf tin, sawed off another equally large piece, and while he chewed he reached for his hankie and blew his nose so loudly that I thought his eyes would pop out. Success! One blow. A few chews. Another blow. A few chews. Another blow. Four blows altogether. He blew before I even had a chance to see his nose run…he just needed more of the food to get his blow barometer working. I knew it!

“I can’t eat another bite,” he exclaimed after finishing what was on his plate and carrying it to the sink.

I was so proud I thought the laces on my peasant blouse would come undone. As I cleaned the table and put everything away, I didn’t even notice that it was hours before I saw Alby again, when he came out of the bathroom red-faced and perspiring.

“You know dad, you were my inspiration to learn how to cook,” I said as I swallowed the last bite of my bagel. “I don’t know how I didn’t kill you all those years ago with that meal,” I laughed.

With a sideways grin and a bit of the devil in him he replied, “If I lived through that dinner, I must be indestructible.”

If only.