I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [8]
My mother often sang as she worked, French Canadian songs, raucously and off-key. When she did sleep or catnap—which she could do anywhere, at a moment’s notice—the snorts and sounds that issued from her gaping mouth rivaled the groans of the sinking Titanic. First, the crash, a ripping sound, then gushing air snorting out of vents, followed by howls, screams, screeches of panic, the blast of klaxons, splashes of falling bodies, and finally, silent, empty calm. Her avalanches of sound, interspersed with acres of dead silence and no breathing, was monumental theater. We would watch her sleeping, wondering, “Is she dead?” Then from her tiny body and the cavern of her mouth would blast an explosion, a pride of maddened lions roaring in their sinuses. Awestruck, we’d burst into laughter, amazed by the magnitude and force of her.
Our home was spotlessly clean. The laundry, sun-and-wind-dried on outdoor clotheslines, was hand-ironed. She was a superb seamstress, designing and making our clothes. Her handiwork was everywhere—bedspreads, curtains, quilts, rugs, and tablecloths—and her gardens, both flowers and vegetables, were nurtured and pampered in their beds. She knew of plants, herbs, mushrooms, and wild edible things, and had tremendous belief that hard work and determination could make all things possible. I always thought that the Boss could take the whole family into the Canadian woods naked in midwinter, and see to it that we all came out by the end of the season fatter and dressed in stylish furs.
My father, Staten Island, 1939 (image credit 1.4)
Pop believed in making a deal, a contract. “Be on time. Work for your employer the eight or ten hours, whatever you agreed on. Avoid overtime. At the end of the day, leave.” If Pop had an hour lunch break and ate in fifteen minutes, he’d boast, “I just go into the men’s room, sit on the toilet, and read the paper for forty-five minutes. Then, I go back to work. Not a minute earlier.” He thought of himself as a hard and honest worker, a blue-collar worker, and he took pride in that, because “your ordinary man is the salt of the earth. Do you think Henry the Fifth could have won the Battle of Agincourt without his yeomen?” His philosophy evolved into: “Find a job, not too demanding, with a decent wage. Do your honest best for the agreed-upon hours of work—then relax, read, listen to music, smoke a good cigar, and, most of all, get in a little fishing.”
French-Canadian Spread recipe—delicious, and fattening (image credit 1.5)
His lack of ambition defined the fishing: I never knew him to catch one. Yet the tales! “Why, right next to me, this little old fellow was reeling them in right and left! Those fish were flopping all over the place, and by God! Do you know what the rascal was using for bait? Bagels!”
What a great storyteller—Pop had the Irish gift for palaver. Among the happiest times of my childhood are memories of my father putting me to bed at sleep time. He would embrace me in his arms and stroke my forehead, as he filled my imagination with his concocted tales. He could make stories up on the spot—a mixture of Irish tales from his own youth, items from the daily newspaper embellished, and, usually, tales with a moral—stories of Peck’s Bad Boy (the Dennis the Menace or Bart Simpson of his day). Pop could weave a brilliant yarn. “Your mother told me you didn’t finish your dinner. Reminds me of Peck’s Bad Boy and the stomachache.” Then he would invent such a tale that you’d be tempted not to eat again the next night, claiming stomachache, in hopes of hearing chapter two. He’d end his stories by whispering, “Couche, couche,” which roughly translates to cuddle, hide, sort of a way of tucking me in.
While my mother snored away, he rose at four-thirty or five in the morning to be at work by six, and occasionally,