QUID AGIS MANE!

    “Quid agis mane?”   (Loosely translated - "How ya doin.") our Latin teacher uttered every morning to start the class.  That phrase still makes me shutter...

     Latin, why in the world do we have to learn Latin? A “dead” language and especially deceased at 8:10 on Monday morning in that strange little MHS classroom with Dr. Ruth Munser.  A room so small there was no place to hide.  Latin 101, I had been at it for a week and at this point not sure if I could master it - even if I were to become a Roman Catholic! 

    
     She continued, (with that slight remnant of a German accent…I wondered why she didn’t teach that living language, instead of being stuck with a language nobody wanted to learn) – “Class please open to page 22 and…now this was a point of no return.  She was going to call on someone to stand and translate the first paragraph into our native tongue – Milvillian Anglo.  

Now Millvillian was a language that to the ear sounded like a South Carolinian twang mix with the drawn out diphthongs Philadelphia patois and it didn’t particularly lend itself to Latin.  But we tried.  And all of us feared having to translate in front of our peers of pain...trying not to think of the horrors of being called on first still makes me sweat and wishing to be invisible

     “Mr. Iszard”.  She always used our last names. “Will you translate the first paragraph”?  (How did she know I didn’t study over the weekend?  But she always knew who wasn’t prepared.)

 I blurted “I am sorry Dr. Munser, but I broke my glasses and won’t be able to read today.  Gads I don’t even wear glasses and I pulled a last resort excuse much too early in the year – this was a costly mistake I would learn later when it really counted.  “Oh, so sorry to hear that…Mr. Iszard.”  The she trumped my trump card.  But then let's do this - you won’t need your glasses to reiterate the point of the text - please conjugate the verb “cross - as in to cross the Rubicon" - for the class will you?  

     Nailed me again!

     And now I faced the consequences for not reading those few pages – a task in those days seemed akin to climbing Mt. Everest.  I stumbled through the task with just one whispered prompt on the last one from a gal pal next to me. 

     Dr. Ruth Munser, doctor of philosophy and tougher than any gladiator – never needed a sword to bring down the mighty and the pompous - just one cold stare.  “You may be seated" and I was dismissed as she called on Dave the Brain to read the paragraph.  (He would graduate Cum Laude and in later life write prescriptions for a living in Latin so his surgical patients would never know just what they were taking “once a day by mouth.") 

     Oh, how I wish that was all I had to worry about today wehn I can't sleep and conjugate the one verb I remember instead of sheep... when I whisper in my mind  - amō…amās… amat… amāmus… amatis… amant – and after repeating it several time the worry that woke me draft away into the darkness for now and I drift off ad sumnun.

THE CHEF

Sometimes when I am making a dinner (well putting a frozen entre' in the microwave) I think about dining when I was growing up…And then I am back on Stratton Avenue in our warm kitchen and Nanny is making dinner once again…

Nanny is working the stove like a masetro and it’s an hour before Pop  and Mom come home for supper.  How many meals did she make in her lifetime?  Thousands! And never, ever complained.  She was not only the cook but the bottle washer too most of the time as my mother worked a long day at the Armstrong Cork Glass factory and came home tired.  My grandmother always said,  “Rest Margaret, you worked hard today,” as they cleared the table. 

This was a modest working man's home – no dining room here.  We ate supper, played cards, did homework and most other things not involved with the TV at our kitchen table.  It was the center of my universe for many years.  

Nanny, Pop, Mom and me.

Nanny made the ordinary seem tastier for a growing boy – a major part of her culinary craft.   But there are several dishes I refuse to order or eat now because of my diet growing up!    

One of these is SOS as the former Navy guys in town called it. 

 Nanny called it “Dried Beef Gravy” … A more refined way of softening the reality that we were having another “inexpensive” single dish dinner.  Just the thought of that reddish dried beef swimming in that white stuff makes me sweat.  For one thing it always looked (and tasted) like the paste in those big jars we used in grade school.  Even today when I see others eat it I start to get a gnawing desire to make a construction paper collage.  

Another item I now refuse is "awful balls" - my name for Brussels Spouts and the only vegetable I was forced to eat many times to a  gag reflex.

A mainstay dish for us was “Meat Cakes” – one of my favorites.  

Now meat cakes were hamburgers without the bun.  But oh so much more delicious when served with fried potato paddys  - left over mashed potatoes from Sunday’s more elegant 3 PM dinner.

Bathed in ketchup, the ever ready seasoning of choice, which made everything taste better in my view. I put it on everything except cereal and chicken – my meat cakes were definitely a treat that were tops of Nanny’s daily faire.  I always asked for more and she would cut one of hers in half.  I never realized until much later how many times mom or she would have sacrificed some of their meal to make sure I was well fed.

And so it went -  Monday’s meat cakes.  Tuesday’s dried beef.  Wednesday’s hot dogs and baked beans.  Thursday’s spaghetti.  Friday’s fried in a pan salmon cakes – we always had fish on Friday, even though we were not Catholic – but Nanny said it couldn’t hurt.  

Saturday was “eat out night”!  We would have French fries and a beef barbecue sandwich or a giant oily sub from George and Mary’s a few blocks away – Indeed a treat! 

And of course Sunday’s was special for  “Sunday Dinner” not supper as the rest of the meals were labeled.  Turkey and ham was a delicacy saved for holidays – our Sunday staple was baked chicken, mashed taters and green beans.  

Nanny’s weekly menu never changed – she could shop for it at the A&P blindfolded.  And we never expected a new surprise dish either – it was just the way it was.  My grandmother was not one to try a Ladies Home Journal recipe experiment.

I have eaten in some of the finest restaurants in the world – The Palm in DC.  Daniels in New York and even the Franklinville Inn in South Jersey (all on the top 100 restaurants list in the USA) – but nothing ever compared to one of my grandmother’s sweet dinners.  
Always made with love and eaten with delight by us all. 

I know now that these meals were never, never taken for granted by the adults at the table.   They were children of the Great Depression.  Putting food on the table was a mission for them.  And they saw to it that I was never hungry once – as they went to bed hungry more than once when my age.  

I am blessed today because of them – in every way.

So, tonight I am making SOS with a side of awful balls – and will make a toast to Nanny the Gran Prix Master Chef of Stratton Avenue.