Nana: The Lady with the Parrot and Two Little Potato-Cakes

I know I was probably underfoot so much that Nana, being a wise old lady, and a calm lady too, who like this photo shows, could keep a huge parrot on her shoulder as if it was the most natural thing in the world. It was Nana who decided that, in her mid-fifties, she would take on the care and feeding of my brother, Jeremy, and myself who were like: Zwei Kleine Kartoffelkuchen. Two little potato-cakes.

Nana decided to put me to work, and in her very German upbringing, the earlier the better. By the time I was 10 or 11 I got a list stuffed in my pocket, and I was marched off down the block and crossed over Centre Avenue to the Ciotti market where I did all the grocery shopping for Nana.

But this shopping was never a hardship. Nana had a lot on her mind, and the kitchen was a perfect place to work it out. Nana wasn’t a super huggy Grandma-type, who said come here child and nestle in my lap, she expressed her love in her world, the kitchen and her world became my world too.

In there, Nana’s kitchen, the warm place of pies and cookies and breads, she and I shared a huge motherlode of working experiences that we never talked about.

Here’s one instance of that unspoken world. And also about bread with Nana. We had potato dough which made doughnuts - Fastnachts - and big fat brown-baked potato cakes strewn with streusel crumbs.

Nana crept into my bedroom. It was about five am, I’m guessing. That’s when she would finally take the bowl of sweet warm and yeasty smelling potato dough that had been rising all night by my bedside. Did she know I had been stealing little pinched off puffs of it from the underside, all night? She must have. But she never said a word. She took the bowl in her hefty arms and went down the hall to the kitchen where she rolled out the dough, and cut it into squares. I could smell the oil heating up. My stomach was hurting from all the raw dough I had eaten, but somehow I would roll over and drift off to sleep, like a little ball of potato dough myself. But soon I would wake up to the smell of frying doughnuts. I threw off the covers and rushed out to the kitchen to find Nana smiling in her apron, topping off a big pile of doughnuts with more hot squares of brown, crispy outside and puffy inside, potato doughnuts for Fastnacht day. There was a satisfied gleam in her eye, but no parrot on her shoulder.

It's not Fastnacht Day today, but Mother’s Day is near, and I am forever thankful to Nana for making room for Zwei Kleine Kartoffelkuchen in her kitchen. And in her life.

She never got to meet them, but she helped me get ready for the two dear little potato cakes in my own life. My sons, Jaryd, with a cookie, and Erick, ready for anything.