The Old Man and Scotch on the Rocks

The lemons were as big as grapefruit. They brought down some branches of the lemon tree so low that they touched the brown, Arizona desert leaving a round, soft indent in the sand.
“Do they taste sweeter than regular lemons, more tart?” I kept asking this, incessantly. The question itself was annoying me and my eagerness and earnest tone was cloying. Oy.
“They are lemons. They taste like lemons. Lemons aren’t sweet. Are you crazy?” my dad said. And that was the obvious answer.
My dad was showing me his garden, full of lemon trees, a fig tree, a nectarine tree and a few apple trees. In a corner was a smaller garden with peppers, tomatoes and zucchini.
He took me to Mrs. White’s in Phoenix and we bonded over the little things like the crushed and whole fennel in my grandfather, his father’s, Italian sausage and then we marveled at the uptight 'tude of my body building brother.
I haven’t been around here in a while, but I am going to post a previously posted and then deleted post I wrote about my dad.
Just visited the old guy in Arizona, home of wrinkled, tanned, turqoised Midwesterners and New Yorkers who go to the land of the sun to live our their last days. I fell in love with the Southwest and with my dad all over again.
So no matter what anyone thinks of this post (which I took down after someone that I relied on at the time told me it didn’t “do it” for her) this post was all about love. So fuck the player haters and upward and onward. Here's to cheating, stealing, tanned, wrinkled dads who live their life like they know it's going to end abruptly and ugly one day.

Aloha, Sucking on a Rib

The plane was swooping and twirling through turbulence when I first met my dad’s mistress.
I was settled in next to my mom on the plane. It was the 70s and her hair was in its Jackie O phase. Although it was dyed blond it still had that helmut top that looked like a butternut squash with tails.
She always let me have the window seat. She always let me have anything I wanted. My three brothers sat in the middle aisle, side by side. All of them had black hair (one bowl cut, one crew cut and one curly.)
My dad kept getting up from his seat to go to the plane’s bar. I kept seeing the back of his droopy sansabelt pants as he headed off with a Parliament in one hand and an empty glass clinking with ice in the other. It was the good old days when long flights were filled with drinks and smokes. We were headed to Hawaii for Christmas. The first family trip I took with them all. I am the youngest.
There was so much turbulence during the second hour of our filght that oxygen masks came bursting out of the overhead compartments and I could hear some women weeping in fear. But to me, it felt like a roller coaster ride. I started batting my oxygen mask with my hand and was laughing so hard and so giddily that my mom kept telling me if I had to pee, I should go to the bathroom. It was right down there, she kept saying and she would turn her large head of dyed blond hair and point to the back at nothing it seemed.
My dad seemd amused by my laughter. He wasn’t around that much so the more amused he was, the less strange he seemed for some reason. He just seemed like a smiling, harmless guy when he laughed at me.
”Just like a ride, isn’t it honeybunch?” my dad said to me as he leaned over my mother to look at me from his standing position in the aisle.
Everyone else on the plane was shaken up. But my dad took me up and down the aisles and displayed my happiness to the rest of the passengers on the plane. I stopped to tell one of them it was like a roller coaster.
Once things calmed down and everyone was settling into the 8 hour flight from Detroit to Hawaii, my father leaned over my mother again and grabbed my hand. I was drinking a small glass of coke and kept letting the ice rest on my front teeth. I used to do this so that my mouth would become numb.
“I want you to meet someone,” he said.
“Do you know someone on the plane? How do you know someone on the plane? Can ma come?”
My dad didn’t answer. He just picked me up over my mom and we made our way to the partition that separated the first class and coach seats.
I saw the big beahive hair first. It was a head of red hair piled up on top of a wrinkly neck.
“This is Carol,” my dad said.
She smiled broadly and put out a bejeweled hand. Rings on every finger. And green, she was wearing a lot of green.
I eeked out a meek hello and ran back to my seat not really knowing what was wrong but knowing something was wrong. My mother was gone. I looked over at my three older brothers and asked where she was and one of them said, “bathroom.”
When she came back, I told her that the woman dad had introduced me to looked like a frog. And she just laughed. Laughed too loud and her eyes welled up. I started laughing too and mentioned again how fun the roller coaster ride was when the plane dropped hundreds of feet earlier.
“You should go tell her that,” my mom said. “Or at least tell your father that.”
So, I found my dad at the bar on the second floor of the plane. I slowly walked up the spirally staircase and said, “Dad, she looks like a frog.”
“Oh, I think she is beautiful,” he said. “Looks like Marilyn Turner. Don’t you think?”
Marilyn Turner was a talk show host on Detroit morning TV. I didn’t know who she was at the time. I was more into the Flintstones.
I ran back down the stairs and my mom was sitting in her seat staring at the staircase waiting for me.
“I said she looked like a frog and Dad said she looked like Marilyn Turner,” I told her.
My mother immediately went to the bathroom. She spent much of the rest of the plane ride in the bathroom.
The next night, my family went out to Trader Vic’s and I ate baby back ribs. It was the one night my dad actually came to dinner with us. Much of the rest of the trip he was with “the frog lady,” my mom told me.
I remember the plate of ribs smothered in a sweet and tangy sauce and I think it was the first time I thought food other than “basta”, as we called pasta, actually mattered.The meat had a perfect textural balance. It slid off the bone but the edges were still crunchy and a bit burned. My dad sat next to me and also marveled at the ribs. He had on kelly green bermuda shorts and for some reason, a paper crown. I may have made it for him.
He spent what seemed like an hour in the kitchen trying to coax the chef into giving him the recipe for the sauce.
I watched him stand in the kitchen and gesture madly at the chef. My dad was an intimidating man to other men. He was big, brown and irrational. At the moment this initmidating former thug was wearing bermuda shorts and his skinny tan legs popped out from underneath and at any chance he could get he took the first two fingers of his right hand and gently pushed in his hernia that rested next to his navel. Finally, the chef gave in. I watched my dad hunch over the tiny man’s shoulder as he wrote down the rib sauce recipe. It’s been my dad’s signature dish ever since. And since my dad spent Saturday nights at home with us he would make it every week on the barbecue.

Hawaiian Rib Sauce:

Ingredients:

1 14oz. bottle of Heinz ketchup
1 5 1/2oz. bottle of Heinz 57 sauce
1/4 cup of soy sauce
1 1/2 T. liquid smoke
1T. garlic salt
1/2 box of brown sugar
1 tsp. of ground ginger
1 tsp. ground dry mustard
1/3 bottle of Worcestershire sauce

Put all ingredients in bowl and mix well. Do not cook. Put in a tight, concealed jar and refrigerate. Keeps for 2 to 3 months in refrigerator.

Comments

[Judy]

Welcome back! This story is amazing on so many levels. . . I have a feeling that the person who didn't like it wasn't exactly clever. Or much of a reader.

[morgen]

you were in phoenix and you didn't call me. sigh. I would have braved that post-apocalyptic suburban desert hell to come say hi. next time, yeah?

[sue]

I'm with sister-this story is amazing!!

[jules]

Miss you, Rose. POST more often!

[Rufus]

Horseradish Sauce Recipe:
Ingredients: sour cream, grated onion, prepared horseradish, salt... view the recipe
http://www.horseradish-sauce-recipe.w8w.pl

[And then some...]

When will you post again?

[Judy McImpatient]

PLEASE start posting again!!!!!