A Cheese Reprieve

Or: how to survive January

Some Context

January sneaks up on me. I begin the month muscling through on optimism, telling myself that encroaching darkness is cozy, and that the momentum of holiday festivity can catapult me into future productivity.

And then January’s gray light begins to sap the zing from my step. I catch myself staring for long moments at the slush dripping from one roof gable to the next. I listen for the low scuttles of a squirrel behind a baseboard (there is nothing more disheartening than an infestation of squirrels: they have no respect). Soon I am wasting a weekend afternoon curled up in an oversized chair, wool afghan tucked under both feet and fingertips, trying not to look my to-do list directly in the eye.

In January, I struggle to feel inspired by much of anything. While I try to doodle every day, I won’t do it at the expense of enjoying the process (the luxury of a hobby). It is harder for me to take that approach with words. Work has trained me to aim for concise, efficient, and targeted language, and I can only shake this off and loosen up when something sparks my memory or captures my imagination. January is not the month for that.

I found a lifeline of sorts in a recent piece by Strong Sense of Place. Melissa was kind enough to share that they’d recommended Doodle Dispatches, putting me in company with brilliants like Tom Cox and Anne Helen Peterson—egads! Surprised and delighted (I am behind on my reading list, among other things), I clicked through for a much-needed dopamine hit and instead found myself completely, unexpectedly disarmed by their short list of cheese memories.

Here is an excerpt:

• melted Muenster cheese with pretzels for dipping while playing video games with my brother

• manchego and olives at a tapas bar in Madrid

• a perfect cheese pull on a slice of pizza in Croatia while looking at the sea

• homemade macaroni and cheese we shared with Czech friends because they'd never tried it before (!)

In pausing to reflect, I was shocked to realize how many vivid cheese memories I have. Is a visceral relationship with cheese unusual? Do we all have the capacity to write a cheese-based memoir?? I passed several diverting minutes this way before realizing that cheese thoughts had released me from a January funk. Parmesan cheese, specifically, had become my muse: the thought of it had raised memories of my grandmother, and the smell of dill and long-ago summers, and I wanted to write.

As a treasured gift from a friend reminds me: “Oh, what a friend we have in cheeses.”

A Parmesan Cheese Memory

Prepare yourself. I am going to describe the hors d’oeuvres that my grandmother used to set out during a typical “cocktail hour.” To set this stage, I’ll note that my dad’s parents were of a very specific era and subtype: they changed for dinner, they observed cocktail hour religiously, and—while they believed that infants were charming—they felt that children were generally to be seen and not heard. Sometimes it was better for women to be quiet, too; at one meal when my grandmother got the giggles, my grandfather rather severely excused her from the table. She went, though she didn’t stop giggling.

A quick sidebar: My mother’s parents were of a similar but distinct subtype. They too changed for dinner and observed cocktail hour, but they were more apt to be silly than disapproving. Conversational sparring was a hallmark of their dinner table, and they encouraged small children to participate. They mixed drinks for us, too: Red Tonys and Shirley Temples, with extra cherries, extra ginger ale, extra ice, extra everything. In real glasses! It was as though we were attending a Montessori cocktail party at knee level, a small, safely scaled version of the Real Thing. Upon reflection I see that cocktails are perhaps not an ideal ritual to share with the elementary school crowd. Even so, I appreciate the space that my grandparents made for our participation.

With my paternal grandparents, however, drinks were usually G&Ts, universally strong, and very obviously NotForChildren. Because we grandchildren might observe but not take part in the conversation, our focus tended to be on the hors d’oeuvres. We would hover near the edge of the coffee tables, staring longingly at the various dishes and asking repeatedly for permission to partake (note that it was only good form to pester your parents).

We learned to haunt the celery and blue cheese dip, but the parmesan goldfish crackers and M&Ms were our first targets. When we were very small, adults would allot these to us in batches of ten or twelve, doled out from small glass custard cups. This was the era of light brown M&Ms—there were no blues yet (red disappeared for a while too, until they made the dye safer). We sorted our M&Ms by color, and sometimes could convince a sibling to make a trade; instead of Montessori cocktail party, imagine a knee-level Wall Street exchange. As the youngest I was usually willing to trade away my green M&Ms (o rarest and best of treasures) in exchange for various browns and some good will. Deals struck, I would retreat to the corner of a card table with my hoard. I nibbled slowly at each goldfish cracker and counted my dwindling pile, filling time as the hum of Grownup Time washed over me.

My grandmother sometimes set out salty, fried minnows in small bowls. These were a regular treat when I was very little, but appeared less and less frequently each summer season until finally the tradition completely lapsed. If memory serves, someone would have scooped these minnows out of the cove overlooked by the living room windows. Sometimes it was my father who used the net that hung in the lifejacket closet by the back steps, dumping the minnows he caught into a bucket of seawater. The bucket was kept in the shade by the steps until the tiny fish could be fried up whole and quickly served.

A strangely literal version of the goldfish crackers, the minnows were so small that we pinched up several at a time to drop into our mouths. I remember the salt; I remember their shiny little eyes; I remember the crunch. These were the minnows that tickled our legs as we hunted shells in the cove. They defined summer as much as the salt spray in our hair.

On festive occasions, cocktail hour would include a platter of quahogs served on the half-shell. These too were pulled up from the shallows of our cove. I could kneel on the down-filled cushions of the wicker couch (always slightly damp with sea air) to watch my stern grandfather wading for them slowly behind the seagrass. He maintained a dignified reserve—even while shirtless, even while feeling around with his toes, even while towing a floating basket behind him, its quahogging license dutifully affixed. I would sometimes think of him this way during cocktail hour, when he was once again a freshly showered patriarch towering above us in his plaid pants, smelling crisply of juniper and lime. Later he would scatter the shells in the driveway, to be crunched by decades of tires into the familiar white ruts that could be seen up and down the street.

I desperately wanted to be someone who ate the quahogs my grandfather pulled up. In our family it was a rite of passage, one that I believed made you (almost) a grownup. I remember the feeling when, sometime around second grade, I chewed and chewed my first rubbery quahog: getting it down, feeling triumph—certain that I loved it, certain that I belonged! The next summer an uncle would point out that quahogs sometimes twitched as the lemon juice hit them, that they were alive as we chewed and swallowed, that this freshness was what made them so delicious. I never ate a quahog again. Still, a photo of my moment of triumph hung in that house until I had small children of my own.

The best hors d’oeuvres of all were my grandmother’s specialty. These were made from pita bread that had been split, buttered, seasoned, and toasted into crackers, and we all considered them to be delicacies. She covered some with Lawry’s Seasoning Salt (that canister had lived in the cupboard since before time), and others with dill and Parmesan cheese. After toasting, she shattered the crackers into jagged pieces, fit them into plastic bags, and layered them in a cookie tin, a futile storage process aimed at warding off the seaside humidity.

Everyone wanted to devour these crackers, though we kids had less shame and self-control. We were drawn in by the smell wafting from the cracker plate—the sharp, rusty hint of Lawry’s mixing with the delicate fragrance of dill. They tasted like heaven. Where the butter had been spread liberally before toasting, flavors would cling to the pita and come alive as you crunched. Conversely, unbuttered sections might leave dry bare spots. During cocktail hour, a grownup meted out cracker sections and you simply accepted your fate—buttered or unbuttered, flavor or failure. That was the lot of childhood. That was the thrill of anticipation.

In later years, one of my sisters reverse engineered these pita hors d’oeuvres, surprising us with them at a family gathering. Tasting them was like seeing a ghost. For a moment I was operating at knee level again, the threshold of adulthood still uncrossed. I was nibbling a goldfish cracker from nose to tail; I smelled juniper; I saw adults deeply immersed in their Grownup Time, as though from across a great distance. Why had I been in such a hurry to join them?