My Aunt Aggie always made lasagna for any holiday, along with tons of other food. She always put mozzarella on top and baked it until it had melted into a golden pale brown.
The dining room was very long and L-shaped into her living room. Aunt Aggie and Uncle Tony had a "blonde" dining room table set, and a buffet along the wall. There was plenty of room to walk around, unlike many dining rooms which do not allow for enough space between the chairs and the walls.
One door led out into the kitchen. The everyday kitchen table was considered to be "the childrens' table," the providence of cousins. When I was young, I wanted nothing to do with that scene. Adults were far more fascinating. My dad let me sit next to him in the dining room. I was polite and well-behaved. Thanks to his tutoring, I knew how to eat properly and was willing to taste all new foods twice. I sat with the adults and absorbed hints of their fascinating world.
I moved to the childrens' table as a pre-teen. By that time, I was old enough to appreciate the privacy of our own world. The move was aided by the presence of my cousins Billy and Judy who had moved to Jersey from down South. The adults let us be, confident that the older kids would help the younger ones.
The other neat thing about Aunt Aggie and Uncle Tony's is that they would not insist that I be social. I read through their magazines and some of their books, studied their four huge fishtanks, and watched teevee. One year, they gave me "Black Beauty" but I was far more interested in the spread about "The Boys in the Band" that was in their Life magazine.
"I thought she was reading 'Black Beauty' and here she is reading a magazine," my Aunt Aggie said. She never looked to see exactly what I was reading and I suppose that was just as well.
Aunt Aggie and Uncle Tony also had a pool, which was closed during the wintertime naturally. They did have a redwood fence around their backyard. I remember their backyard even in the winter. The living room downstairs [there seemed to be the one upstairs which ran into the dining room; and one downstairs] had sliding doors which led to a cement deck and then to shrubbery and the pool.
One time around Christmas time, my Uncle Tony took my dad and I to the local bowling alley. Uncle Tony was quite the bowler. He had the shoes and bowled in a league. I remember eating there at the bowling alley and someone ordered the roasted duck. The duck came, stomach side up on the platter, with two sinewy ropes attaching his bill to the rest of him. Dark brown he was, and swimming in a puddle of grease. Dad said, "See the grease, it wasn't cooked correctly." I gave the duck the proverbial two-bites test and promptly put it into the category of foods I didn't like. This proved to still be true years later when I tasted a baked duck at a restaurant and I found even though the restaurant duck wasn't swimming in grease, it didn't taste any better than the first duck with the bill still attached.
sapphoq on life
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