Pot Roast for Dinner

Sometimes, I will remember a sentence for years, even decades, before I really understand what it means and why it matters.

Here’s one, from the novel A River Runs Through It: Now, nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

I did not understand my parents. My father died in 2000. I was very close to him, loved him very much, and I understood more about him, I think, than most sons understand about their fathers. That being said, he was 45 when I was born, and there was a lot about him I couldn't grasp. I reach out to him, I believe, with fly fishing, with every fire I build in the fireplace, and with my daughter Grace, who looks like him.

My mother died last June. I understood her much less well. She was an intensely private, disciplined, guarded woman, who was correct, as she saw it, in everything she did. I never really understood what made her that way, or why she was so hard to get close to. So, I find myself reaching out to her through, last night, a pot roast.

I and my four brothers and sisters grew up in a small village in Western New York state. My mother was responsible for feeding seven people (at least) three times a day. ?We lived in a very rural area, with long, cold, dark winters. Although my father was a surgeon, he had a lot of kids to feed, and medicine in a small place like that was not exactly a ticket to riches, so the grocery budget wasn’t infinite.

Pot roast was one of my mother’s staples. It’s pretty standard in New England. It’s incredibly cheap and very simple – a big cut of beef, parked in a heavy pot with onions, carrots, potatoes, red wine, beef broth, salt, pepper, garlic and … that’s it. Put it all in the oven, leave it there for two hours and it's ready.

When it’s done, the beef is so tender it falls apart when you cut it. The carrots are soft, rich, sweet. The potatoes are perfect. And at the bottom is this thick, dark, delicious gravy which turns the beef into something incredible, almost French in richness. Scoop everything into a bowl, maybe provide some bread if you feel like it, and dinner is ready. This isn’t sushi – it’s hearty food for hungry eaters. Last night we ate it in front of the fire.

Fifty years ago, I ate it in the dining room, with the children serving, clearing and doing the dishes. My father sat at the head of the table, in the only chair with arms. My mother was on his right. Outside it was grey, and cold, snowy or rainy. The table was full of restless kids, fighting for attention. We ate on Corelle plates, used stainless steel silverware, napkins in napkin rings. We drank milk. We had to ask permission to leave the table. Arguing was not permitted, and neither were discussions of the plots of television shows, dreams or movies because they irritated my father.

Now I live in Carmel, California, a place where houses cost millions of dollars. Brad Pitt just bought one. Downtown, instead of Henyan’s Sporting Goods and That Other Place (a bar) we have Tiffany’s and Khaki’s of Carmel – where I saw a pair of decent, but not amazing, casual shoes priced at $800. Instead of ordinary people in jeans, boots and parkas in the winter, we have beautiful, exotic women shopping with their much-older, rich second or third husbands. The women float in and out of boutiques while the men wait outside.

So, I reach out, from now to then. I’m sixty years old myself, and I’m hoping, perhaps, to put my finger on the old, worn, brittle thread that connects my life to that one, that shows me how I got here and who I am.

It’s in my memories, of course, and my daughters. It’s in the battered first edition of A River Runs Through It my father gave me decades ago. It’s in my law degree, like my mother’s, that hangs next to hers on the wall of my office.

And it’s in the wonderful, rich smell that rises from the dinner I made last night. Despite her death and the distance between us, now infinite, it smells exactly like hers used to. I think it tastes just as good.