There are some days that I want to pick up the phone and call heaven. Other friends feel the same since inspirational messages containing this thought are frequently posted on my Facebook stream. The thought usually occurs when I am doing something I know my loved ones high above would want to know about. Driving a long distance when I am in the passenger seat and my husband behind the wheel makes us miss calling his sister. He hates chatting on the phone and if I dialed, he was forced to talk to a sister we both adored.
Cooking ethnic recipes makes we wish I could let my mother know her descendants enjoy my grandmother’s recipes! Most of my traditional dishes have been passed down for generations via my maternal family although once-used animal fats have been replaced by healthy ones. I learned to cook at my mother’s side. Most recipes were memorized early in life. When I am stumped while preparing a dish I rarely cook, I glance at the phone. I have a flashback picturing me cradling the old-fashioned receiver between my ear and shoulder as my mother verbally guided me through a recipe.
I can make chicken soup “in my sleep.” The lack of a recipe only caused a problem once. I inherited my mother’s huge pots, the kind as my husband says, “hold enough soup for an army.” My instructions were to put in the chickens and fill the pot to the stain mark made by decades of cooking. When the pot needed to be replaced, I was glad I remembered my mother also warning to just add enough water to cover the chickens or the soup will taste like dish water.
One recipe that is lost forever is how my mother prepared sweetbreads and exactly what she used to sauté them. A Google search was fruitless. The suggestions insist vinegar be used to soak the raw food making it easier to remove the membrane before cooking. My mother never used vinegar in her cooking, so unless I can find a séance to connect me to heaven, I can’t duplicate the recipe.
Since moving to a community densely occupied with transplants from areas where I once lived, the urge to call heaven comes when I meet new people and we play “ethnic geography.” Sometimes my new acquaintance and I realize that there was a good chance our long-gone parents were once friends, neighbors or co-workers.
Recently, I was sitting at the nail drying table in a local nail salon. I was sharing the fact that I give humorous talks at local groups and added that I was now working on a speech about my religious heritage. I indicated that I would probably begin by holding up a seltzer bottle. With that, two other women said that their fathers were also seltzer men in Brooklyn like mine — remember the home delivery trucks stacked with cases of seltzer and soda? At that point I wished out loud that we could call heaven to see if our fathers knew each other. After all, they all had their bottles refilled by Good Health Seltzer, so the chances are great that they did.
This past May I attended my youngest grandson’s religious confirmation in Georgia. His name was called and then another classmate, Max, was called. As Max approached the front of the room I remembered having a conversation with Max’s father, my son’s friend, about 8 years prior in my son’s home. Max’s father had noticed a photograph of my dad next to his soda truck and said in his southern accent, “My granddaddy drove one of those in Brooklyn.”
After he shared this, I looked at two of the seltzer men’s descendants; one was my grandson, Jacob, the other, Max, my younger grandson’s friend. These two boys carried their great-grandfathers’ names. True they are common names today as they were 100 years ago. There was no way I could call heaven to see if I was dining with the family of my father’s best friend, and best man at his wedding, Maxie.
As I sat in the temple and watched two descendants of long gone seltzer men receive the rabbi’s blessings, I wondered if their great-grandfathers were looking down from heaven and smiling because their grandsons, over a thousand miles south of Brooklyn, were friends. No way to find out. However, hopefully after “everyone” finishes doing their family trees via Ancestry and other sources, someone will begin a “who knew who” website. The chances of that happening are a lot better than me being able to dial heaven.
Eda Suzanne (Lang) is a retired Florida teacher who enjoys life in an active senior community. Her humorous book, "Retired Not Expired," is available on Amazon. Contact Eda directly if you would like to entertain your club or charity at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.