I’m veering away from the topic of gardening for a moment to address another topic about which I am passionate. Raising a family.
A discussion with my co-worker over why I would polish off a huge hot dog when I was only hungry for half brought up my father’s chide when I was small– that I needed to clean my plate because of all those starving Armenians. About a day later, an NPR interview about Rice-a-Roni helped bridge that recollection of childhood with the history behind my father’s saying—and then plunged me into criticizm of the modern day assumption that leaving family and hometown to pursue one’s own career and family is beneficial.
Bear with me, it is convoluted, but the lesson is valid.
Let me step back to the conversation that started it all. It was something like this:
Me: “Wow these hot dogs from the Children’s Hospital food cart are huge— I wanted to ask them for a smaller one but this was all they had.”
Jessica: “You know, you could just eat half and finish the rest later.”
Me: “Never gonna happen. I cannot let food sit around, if it’s in front of me– I eat it. I blame my father.”
Jessica: “What?”
Me: “You know, Dad was the one who told me to clean my plate because of all those starving Armenians.”
Jessica: “Armenians?”
Me: “Yeah. Hmmm. You know I’m not sure who the Armenians were. Is there even an Armenia?”
The next day I arrived at work while listening to a wonderful NPR story. this story. was by the Kitchen Sisters, about origins of Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat, for the latest installment of “Hidden Kitchens”– the reader was saying there was a link to Armenians.
What ho?! First of all, I loved Rice-a-Roni as a child and my mother was from San Francisco. But here now was a link to a puzzling question that had just come up yesterday.
Turns out a little old Armenian lady took in a young couple as boarders around the end of the Second World War. The young wife hung around with her sweet, elderly new host while the husband went off to work in the family pasta business. Young wife had long conversations with the Armenian lady in which the grandmotherly woman told about how her family was exterminated by the Turks and she fled on foot with other survivors, losing her husband and small children in the fray. These rich, historic conversations unfolded over a large dining table while they rolled out filo dough, made grape-leaf wraps, and put together rice pilaf a-la Armenian lady’s family recipe.
See the NPR story here.
So there I had it. First of all, my favorite dish of childhood was actually a rice pilaf dish that had pasta thrown in by the young couple who invented it in the early 50’s… but the spices and the roots go back to Armenia… the little-known location with the mysterious, starving populous.
I had to know more. I looked up the term “Starving Armenian” and came up with a column by Cecil Adams on a site called The Straight Dope. What I learned is that my father wasn’t admonishing me to clean my plate because there were starving Armenians out there. He was teasing me with the admonishment his mother used on HIM when he was little. And it further appears that she was repeating what she had heard from HER mother before… since the Armenians were forced from their country and killed and starved at the turn of the century.
It should have felt satisfying to learn all this, but instead I felt wistful. I missed my parents and the stories they told. I wished I could be in my grandmother’s kitchen learning about recipes and history all at once. I further wished my children could have precious experiences like that with my parents.
Maybe it was because my children were away staying at my mother-in-law’s house– getting some of those stories from the Bartoo side of the family. Maybe it was because we had just had to put our precious dog Harper down and the reality of mortality was palpable. Maybe it was all the coincidences seeming eerily like a message I ought to pay attention to, but it led to a realization about choices I had made in life. I suddenly felt my modern day feminist-style pursuit of career was a bag of goods I had been sold– and now I was finding it was full of gaping holes.
I told my husband the whole convoluted tale and finished by reveling my new insight– that it was a shame we didn’t live near either of our parents… at least not near enough for the children to have such mundane experiences in the kitchen as would stimulated a wonderful old story. I think one has to spend enough time with someone doing ordinary tasks like cooking or rollin out filo dough to create the perfect setting for good story-telling. At least for story-telling to come naturally.
Because our visits with Grandparents are long distance and brief, the conversations are catch-up variety: “How is school, are you getting along with your sister, what’s your favorite hobby,” and “how’s your health, has anyone else died, and what are the ladies up to in your lunch group.”
We never get a chance to be around for an organic conversation that could lead to an explaination of the starving Armenians. We don’t hear the lessons our parents and Grandparents learned about what humans are capable of so that we can avoid terrible things the next time around.
I am not sugesting that we live in the past, I am suggesting that there is great benefit to living very closely with older people whose history is linked with our own. The value of telling stories face-to-face while doing something like cooking or cleaning, or going through family photos cannot be overstated. How I wish I had known about this when I was younger.
I think I’ll buy a box of Rice-a-Roni to fix while I tell my children about my Mother’s days in San Francisco (and perhaps drop in a bit about Armenians), then call my parents and tell them they must prepare a good story to tell my children when we come in for Labor Day.
