A Recipe for Secret Sauce

Aunt Mary and Uncle Louie died long ago, but they’re still around as ghosts or as love, and it’s hard to determine which. For example, when you are reclined in the dentist’s chair having your tooth fixed, Aunt Mary suddenly materializes beside the dentist and does her famous false teeth comedy. This is the same brief skit she performed for the children long ago, aimed first to shock the youngsters, then to stumble them onto the grass with hysterical glee. The apparition that she is, she pushes her top set of pearly whites at you in a moment of squeamish fright, levering them up and down with her gums, peeks at your dentist, then sucks them right back in. You do a double take, shaking your head loose of the image, chuckling to yourself over this zany family memory. But you look askance while the dentist rummages in your mouth, and there is Aunt Mary again floating above with a quick wink of the eye and a pinch to your arm. “Ouch!” you garble, to which the dentist instantly halts his work. But Mary is gone. This time for good. A specter? A loving memory? No one will ever know.

Another instance when Mary and Louie are lurking about is at gift-giving time when someone honors Uncle Louie’s gifting genius by hiding money into the bowels of a gift, for old time’s sake. It is some dollars, or some fives, painstakingly tucked into illogical crevices of an item, and then presented as a super-puzzle. Super in its mystery, super in its money. It’s all super like Louie, and he stands there, a ghost with that signature modesty of his, waiting to see how long it’ll take before the recipient becomes wise to the prize.

But these are only two examples. There are plenty more. The reason there are plenty is not only because Mary and Louie are haunting the living. It’s because there was that je ne sais quoi about their presence years ago which even in their death we’re still trying to put our fingers on—oh, did we love them dearly. All this, and we’re not even French, but Slovene.

Mary and Louie were my grandfather’s siblings. Neither of them married, so they utilized each other’s company in their older age, residing in their childhood home together. Louie and one of his brothers owned and ran the local hardware store for decades. Mary had been a nurse at one point, but then took care of Louie as time went on. She was a short, stout woman, and Louie matched her height because of the polio that stunted his growth as a youngster. Whenever I saw them, at holidays and during the summer, they were together as a compact duo, arriving and leaving side-by-side, like a teetering set of salt and pepper shakers.

Most summers my mother would drive us kids to my grandparents’ homey summer lake house in PA, and we’d lounge away steamy days with a degree of good fortune that took an adulthood to comprehend. Once we were there, Mary and Louie would drive over from their nearby home to lounge alongside us. We became one of several sets of surrogate grandkids to them on loan from their numerous siblings. Summer at the lake was peaceful and carefree, especially if you were a kid. It’s when Mary and Louie came around that it was funny. But it was at the end of December that visiting Mary and Louie had such special value.

Up through my college years, my family would drive NJ-to-PA to spend holidays with my grandparents. One essential piece of any holiday season was a visit to see Mary and Louie, another 45 minutes deeper into northeastern PA. There were lots of us who arrived in numerous cars, and we all piled into the smaller, modest home of my great aunt and uncle. As I’ve learned many times since, it’s not the size or the fanciness of the home that attracts folks. It’s the people inside. We don’t go to experience a building. We go to experience community.

Community was all over Mary and Louie’s home. It was in the traditions they kept for us: from the holiday candies to the kielbasa, from the lit-up nativity to the plastic mistletoe dangling from the arch in the middle of their home. It was in their signature interactions which came in the form of warm-hearted stories and good-humored jokes. It was in the largess they showed at mealtimes, cooking for such a crowd. It was in the conversation rising from their genuine curiosity in others’ lives. It was in all the ways they worked to learn about you and give to you.

Mary and Louie had a secret sauce that was drizzled over the person each of them served up to the world. I’m still not exactly sure what the ingredients were in this sauce, but since it tasted distinct, you could sleuth out some of its components.

For one, there was a humility in this gravy, and perhaps at the very base of the roux. It was elemental to them, like color on the sky or texture on the tree. Maybe this was why you always felt at ease in their presence. It washed over their tone of voice and folded gently into their worldview that each life was a member of the whole.

The second ingredient was humor, mostly coming from Mary and her mischievous eye—the pinches, the chuckles, and remember the teeth. But it came from Louie in his tricky gifts and absurdly powerful handshake, which was an intentional joke on the kids.

Louie stood not too much taller than a 10-year-old but when he reached out his hand for a formal shake, he’d ransack the flimsy kid arm like an egg beater. He’d promise you to shake normal this time, but then didn’t, and you fell for it every time. When you reached your preteens, you sought this trickery out. These antics gave the sauce its oomph.

The third ingredient was care. My great aunt and uncle seemed content to function in the name of someone else. A daily generosity was the backdrop of their schedule for the day. It’s what gave them purpose and their lives meaning, or so it seemed to me. I get quiet inside when I remember this about them. They didn’t give themselves away. Instead, whatever they gave out came back as a further refinement to their sauce. The better the sauce, the better the life.

There was a final flavor: gratitude. Even as a child I could detect this in them. Mary and Louie appreciated the life bubbling all around. It’s possible this came from the experiences they lived through—war, the Depression, a simpler and cohesive community. They were grateful for the small gifts and mentioned this, almost as a ritual to end a sentence. Gifts so miniscule as to be nearly hidden were clear as day to them. I’m sure this gratitude is why, when you tasted their sauce, you wanted to know what was in it, and you wanted to make it your own.

During my childhood, the winter holiday time was mostly situated at my grandparents’ home, and Mary and Louie always trekked over to be a part of it. My grandparents’ house had an expansive window running the length of the living room on the second floor which overlooked a patio below it and the lake’s edge beyond that.

In the winter, the lake would be iced over many inches thick, and this hosted our family as we skated in circles on top of it or fished through holes drilled into it. There’d be hollers from whomever was keeping watch beside the large window that a tip-up had just disengaged and was waving its little flag in the wind, alerting to the likelihood a fish was hooked in the icy water below. Often this would be Aunt Mary or Uncle Louie who liked to sit in one of the watch chairs next to the window. My great uncle had a small voice, so it was more of a relay. He’d raise his voice as far as he could to someone in the room, “Tip-up!” Then one of our loud members (which was everybody else) would broadcast it through the rest of the house to whomever was feeling hearty enough to don their warm garb and slide back along the ice to pull up the fish.

The event went from the fish, to the tip-up, to Louie, to a loud one, to the hearty one, back to the fish. Then eventually we ate the fish. It was a cycle.

Maybe that is what a secret sauce really is, a cycle of sorts. It’s the cycle that each of us simmers through in life, depending on who’s together with whom, when, where, and what is going on. We’re born with some basic ingredients and then gradually develop our own unique sauce which every day we serve atop ourselves as we make our way in the world. On the one hand, there’s only one cook: each of us. But on the other, there are countless cooks in the kitchen, and countless relays going on, mixing of ingredients, passing of dishes, receiving, serving to plates, partaking, relaying again and again. It is a constant cycle of interaction, refinement, learning, and becoming.

It’s quite the potluck, isn’t it?

And, so, this leaves me to wonder about my own sauce. What is in it? And what have I brought to the table? What will I offer this holiday and beyond? Those are some good questions I’m going to ruminate on.

Anyway, bon appetite.