On our way home one day my daughter asked me if we could make meatballs for dinner. If she only knew the baggage I carried with the utterance of that little flavor-filled word. Only in my head I hear the way my Italian grandma used to say it. Meat-a-balls.
If you wanted to make meat-a-balls, you had to do it right. There were certain ingredients. Certain procedures. It wasn’t an easy task.
Realizing we actually had all the required ingredients at home, including the Italian parsley I had purchased with meatloaf in mind, I couldn’t say no. My daughter quickly Googled a recipe in the car so she could confirm the list with me. Ground beef, bread crumbs, parsley, garlic, onions, egg, salt, pepper…all a check.
She retrieved said ingredients one by one, and dumped them into our red plastic bowl as I mixed. I stood there quietly with a flood of thoughts, memories, and emotions fueling my bare, sticky, kneading hands. Mix meat-a-balls with a spoon? You aren’t a real Italian.
The sounds, smells, sights and senses of my grandmother’s kitchen sit in me in a bright, love-filled place in my heart. They take up more space than the bad stuff does. I rely on them when I am pulled under by one of the dark moment memories from that house. All I have to do is take the walk across the big foyer, over that stiff, dark green, fifty year old turf-like carpet and through the tiny doorway into the bright kitchen and my life is good.
Grandma’s kitchen was where we hung, cooked, ate, and worked out the important issues of the world. Gram spent most of her life in two spots in that huge, three story San Franciscan home – the kitchen and the lounger, in front of Days of our Lives. Her job was to cook. And meat-a-balls were one of her specialties.
Meat-a-balls always went into a homemade marinara sauce that we would later pile on top of pasta, usually Rigatoni but sometimes Spaghetti. Sunday was pasta and meat-a-balls night. Every week. For our entire childhood.
This night my kitchen smells like Gram’s. My daughter rolls up green-specked balls of meat, all different sizes, because I don’t care about meatball rules, and we toss them into the pan and listen to them crackle in the hot olive oil. I show her how to brown them on all sides and check for doneness. Then we throw them into our pot of warming Classico Basil and Garlic Pasta Sauce because homemade marinara is not a weeknight possibility.
Taking a long, deep, garlic-filled breath through my nose I think to myself, “Hey, I can make meat-a-balls too!” A soft, long-awaited feeling of satisfaction settles into some deep part of me. It fulfills so many little, life-long yearnings all at once I have trouble knowing which one to be happy about first.
The swoosh and squeak of my front door announces my son’s arrival and as he drops his bag on the floor with a thud I hear, “It smells good in here.” I can’t help it…the corners of my mouth slide into an involuntary smile and standing next to my assistant meat-a-ball chef, my daughter and I look at each other and exclaim in unison, “We made meatballs!”
All at once I am both the proud cook in my awesome smelling kitchen and the kid crossing the foyer of my Gram’s house on meat-a-ball night…and life is good.
Laura Probert, MPT is the owner of Bodyworks Physical Therapy and the occasional chef of really good meatballs. Check out her new workshop series and writing group offerings here: www.bodyworksptonline.com Sign up for her newsletter on the website and she promises to send great, inspirational stuff about living a kick-ass life to your inbox 1-2 times a month! Plus you will get some sort of cool freebie when you subscribe!
