Once again hours and hours in the car paid off with a beautiful nugget from the radio. Yesterday on NPR I heard an interview with Annie Liontas about her debut novel, Let Me Explain You. A Greek patriarch of a dysfunctional (really, is there any other kind?) family has a dream in which he is visited by the Goat of Death (yes!) and is convinced he is going to die in 10 days.
A lot of the story, it seems, revolves around food. Like Proust’s madeleine, the patriarch has a moment with galaktoboureko, a golden Greek pastry with cream and syrup, that transports him to the past.
Sometimes we need another language, the prism of another culture, to help us say what we feel, what we know to be true, isn’t that amazing? Liontas describes something lovely and incredibly dense:
…food in this book is a kind of – a kind of language when language fails. And it’s a kind of translation for, ah, family connections when those connections are breaking down. And there’s even an idiom that, for me, drives much of the book, which is (speaking Greek) which means “I ate the whole world to find you.”
Food as a means of communication, as language when words fail: this speaks to every fiber of my being. There is something so simple, primal, visceral about the act of eating, the senses of smell and taste are like direct lines to who we are, including our pasts– no filter, it’s all just, there.
A few hours before I heard the interview I’d learned my uncle, my mother’s older and only brother, had died, up in Halifax. He was my only uncle. Brilliant, witty, debonair, his beautiful wife matched him step for step, and I loved them both. He was named for my grandfather, Angus L.; this is the end of an era.
Summers we were in Halifax Buddy would take us out on the boat (his Canadian pronunciation of that word is something I will forever miss), to an island to picnic, to the A&W drive-in; brought us enormous salmon from Cape Breton, regaled us with stories on the verandah overlooking the Northwest Arm. Years later my landlocked parents received coolers of lobsters and scallops from Nova Scotia at Christmas. What feasts. An A&W root beer on any day will bring me back to my six-year old self, in the back of Bud’s super cool convertible, munching on fried chicken. Life in those moments was, so sweet.
My own family has pretty much dissolved in the wake of my mother’s death. It is something I never expected, but there it is, and life like a river flows on.
But we will always have food that binds and reminds us. Will pick up some A&W today.
I ate the whole world to find you.