What Good You Can't Eat

As a child, I spent a lot of time with my paternal grandparents, which resulted in me spending a lot of time, at least for the first twelve years of my life, with my great grandmother.  She is the woman in the photo on the top of my blog page and, she is the woman who is responsible, albeit indirectly, for my blog title.  What good you can’t eat?  When I hear those words in my mind they are spoken by my great grandmother, in her broken English with a heavy Polish/Russian accent. 

Katherine Paszko was her name.  We, my brothers and sister and I, called her Mom Mom Patch because we were unable to pronounce her last name.  She was my father’s maternal grandmother and, during my lifetime, lived in my grandparent’s home until she died when I was twelve.  Although she was only in my life for a short time, she has managed to have an incredible influence on me.  An influence I wasn’t really aware of for a long time.

Mom Mom Patch was an immigrant.  From what her daughter, my grandmother, told me she was born in Eastern Europe, most likely Poland, in about 1894.  My grandmother would tell me her family was from Russia, since relatives had served in the Russian army. Over the years I have learned it is more likely my family was from Poland, and the country just happened to be occupied by Russia at the time my immigrant ancestors fled to America. 

I think there was part of my grandmother that was ashamed of being Polish, with all the jokes about Polish people being stupid.  I suppose, to my grandmother, being Russian sounded so much more romantic and regal.  My grandmother was probably thinking of the Dr. Zhivago Russia and not the Josef Stalin Russia.  Whatever the country of her origin, suffice it to say my family comes from Eastern European stock and we have the thick bodies and love of cabbage to prove it.

As a child, Mom Patch looked to me nothing like the robust, laughing woman in the photo.  She was tiny and hunched over, almost shriveled.  Her thin gray hair was streaked with black and was worn short and unstyled.  She cut it herself with sewing scissors, a habit I unfortunately have picked up myself.  Unlike my grandmother, who prided herself on her appearance with weekly salon visits and a beautiful wardrobe, Mom Mom Patch didn’t seem to care about being pretty.   

I was both fascinated and a little frightened by this woman.  I was frightened because, to be quite honest, she looked a little like how I imagined a witch would look.  Her teeth were dark and kind of pointy.  Her hair was stick straight, grayish-black and a bit tousled.  In all fairness, when you’re in your eighties you don’t really spend much time on hair maintenance. 

Her one concession to “fashion” was probably the fancy silver and black cat eye glasses she wore.  They were quite dated in the 1970s and clearly she had worn them for a long time.  Having just gotten my “Jan Brady” glasses at the age of ten, I was fascinated by Mom Mom Patch’s glasses.  They were silver metal and had black inlaid filigree in a floral pattern on the corners.  They were quite fancy, but somehow did not seem out of place on a shrunken little immigrant woman wearing homemade dresses of sturdy cotton and corduroy bedroom slippers. 

She always wore an apron, no matter what she was doing.  I cannot recall ever seeing her wearing anything but her usual sturdy cotton dress and apron.  In fact, I’m now wondering what she wore in her coffin when she died.  I was there (it was my first funeral and quite a big deal) but don’t recall what she how she had been dressed.  It seems that if she was dressed in anything other than the housecoat and apron it would be wrong and out of place.  Most likely, my grandmother had her dressed to the nines.  Poor Mom Mom Patch.

The fact that I couldn’t understand a word she said also managed to increase my anxiety around her.  Most of the time I couldn’t understand a word she said.  As she grew older she reverted to her native Polish.  She would shuffle up and down the hall of my grandparent’s house doing various chores my grandmother assigned her.  She was always busy doing something – whether ironing in her room or sewing clothing for my Chrissy dolls.

The only time I can recall her relaxing was when she would listen to Bobby Vinton records on the stereo.  Bobby Vinton, being a good Polish boy, was a god in that household.  She would sit in my grandfather’s chair, wearing a giant pair of head phones on her tiny head and the slightest bit of smile of her face.  Whenever I hear “Blue Velvet” I think of my great grandmother.

 Mom Mom Patch’s idiosyncrasies even extended to her eating habits.  She always ate at the kitchen table.  For all the fancy dinners my grandmother served in the dining room, Mom Mom Patch ate in the kitchen.   She drank strong black coffee.  No sugar or cream, just the way I drink my coffee now.  I can recall her sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of fried cabbage, cottage cheese and apple sauce which she spread on thick slices of yeasty black bread bought from a special bakery.  When she ate she didn’t use the same utensils that everyone else did.  She used a wooden handled three pronged fork with tines so sharp they could pierce your skin. 

But, the most unnerving thing about her was that she was missing a finger.  It has been many years, but I believe she was missing the index finger on her right hand.  This was the result of an accident in a sewing factory where she had worked when she first came to this country.  What remained was the first section of that finger, from the hand to the first knuckle.  It was just a nub of a finger with a star like pattern on the end where it had been crudely sutured.  It wasn’t horribly gruesome, but it made her all the more mysterious to me.

Mom Mom Patch was always there.  In photos she was there with me and my siblings, dressed in our Christmas finery, with what looks like a smile on her wizened face.   She was there at the ironing board pressing my grandmother’s crisp white sheets.  She was there, at the kitchen table with a cup of hot black coffee reading letters from Poland filled with strange curlicue symbols written with a fountain pen.  She was a reminder, perhaps an unhappy reminder to my grandmother, of my family roots in another country, another culture.

My interaction with her, however, was peripheral.  I was a child and took her and her story for granted.  But her story, like the story of so many immigrants to this country is fascinating.  This was a woman who left her mother and the only country she had known, at the age of 16, to come to America.  Her brother had come to Philadelphia a few years before and he sponsored his younger sister’s trip.  She left, the route and mode of travel is unknown to me, and never saw her mother and her homeland again.  I cannot imagine making such a trip as a teenage girl.  One thing is for sure: this woman meant business.

Once in America she came to Philadelphia, worked in the homes of the wealthy as a maid, and then toiled for hours in various sewing factories.  Eventually she married, had a child (my grandmother) and raised her brother’s three children after both he and his wife died of an illness at very young ages.  She lived in small bungalow in Southern New Jersey, had a garden, raised chickens and made her own wine.  She took in other people’s laundry to make ends meet, a fact which my grandmother was embarrassed by until the day she died.  She did not have an easy life, particularly in the beginning, but this woman didn’t let it stop her.

I think what illustrates Mom Mom Patch the most is a comment she made when visiting my childhood home one time to see my parents vegetable garden.  It was the 70s and my parents, like most people at that time, went through their own “hippie” stage.  This meant they made candles, decoupage plaques, macramé wall hangings, and had a garden.  A very large garden from which they harvested various vegetables which they canned in heavy Ball jars and hoarded on shelves in our basement. 

One of the things my mother grew in that garden were gourds, which she dried and used for decoration.  When Mom Mom Patch came to see the garden, she had never seen a gourd before.  My mother explained to her that they were not to eat, but were only for decoration.  She looked at my mother like she was crazy and replied “What good you can’t eat.”  That sums up Mom Mom Patch - if you can’t eat it, why bother growing it.  Who has time for frivolous things like flowers and gourds when life was hard?

I hadn’t thought about this interaction in many, many years.  It was not until after my grandmother’s death, when I was going through a box of old pictures, that I again began to really contemplate this woman, Mom Mom Patch.  For years I had felt out of place in my life.  I was so unlike my mother, a flirty girly-girl, who was forever criticizing me for my lack of make-up and love of all things casual.  My grandmother, Mom Mom Patch’s daughter, was more tolerant of my tomboy ways, but she too, in her high heels and fancy suits and jewelry (she was a working mother before it was acceptable), was foreign to me.  

Not to mention the fact that I was not built like either my mother or my grandmother, who were both small and petite.   I always felt wrong and out of place, my body too solid, my breasts too big.  I joke that I come from strong peasant stock.  I have always been a very practical girl who has no need for fancy, frivolous, playful things.  I’m a serious, no nonsense broad who gets the job done and moves on.  My female role models, while hard working women, were a mystery to me.

While going through this box I came across photos of my grandmother’s family.  One of the photos (the one show at the beginning of this post) was of my grandmother (I recognized her pointy little nose and chin) standing next to a large, heavyset woman, with short bobbed hair and fat sausage like arms.  She was wearing a flowered dress and no jewelry.  Her feet were squeezed into sensible black shoes and her heavy legs were covered with cotton tights.   I recognized her immediately as Mom Mom Patch.  Physically she didn’t resemble the shrunken little woman of my youth, but there was something about the deep set eyes and the strong chin and mouth that was familiar to me.  I immediately felt a connection and a sense of acceptance – that was my body, I thought.  That is where I come from. 

This revelation got me thinking more and more about the woman that was Mom Mom Patch.  The woman that came to this country a girl and worked long and hard to raise a family, build a home and become an American.  The woman who never threw anything out but instead repurposed and reused everything.  My God, she kept a ball of used string in the kitchen drawer.  The woman who “made do” during the depression by mending and fixing and doing without.  I think she wore the same nightgown for years.  When she died we found a drawer filled with new nightgowns, still in the package, that she was saving for the hospital.  The woman who had no time for prettiness, no time for frivolity, and certainly no time for gourds!

And that, I thought, is where I come from.  I don’t just physically resemble Mom Mom Patch, I try to approach life like her too.  This revelation has given me a greater sense of belonging and a stronger connection to my roots.  Life is hard.  Often so hard you think that it will break you.  You just have to keep moving.  You have to know what is truly important and it’s often not what you think it is.  Mom Mom Patch’s words have become my mantra in life.  For me it means that often the things that we think are important, really aren’t and that sometimes through hard work and perseverance we discover what really is.  So, thank you, Mom Mom Patch for my tenacity, my doggedness, and my determination.  Thank you for helping me know the joy and satisfaction that comes from the simplest things in life.  And yes, thank you for revealing your philosophy on life - that you gotta know what’s real in order to survive.  All of this you have given to me through those simple words:  what good you can’t eat.