It was Saturday morning early and Rhonda stood at the grill making my pancakes.
She’s been doing that for about 30 years. Maybe 35. Before that, I was in the Army and across the country, but she was there, pouring and flipping horizontal rows of batter and buckwheat, twelve hours a day, each year when the sap was flowing.
Her family’s been after it for more than 50 years. They made syrup and then they made pancakes and ultimately they made a tradition. For my family and thousands of other families, and for two months each year an empty country road, in the high hills of Allegany County, is choked with cars from Buffalo and Rochester, making the annual pilgrimage to the pancake house.
It’s a joyous trip.
It anchors my year, a meal of my people and place, buckwheat from Penn Yan and syrup from these hills here, from glades and groves of brother maple, the Cartwright family bringing it and us all together, all you can eat, all you can feel, all you can remember, where my great-grandfather and my grandson and all in between have partaken, communion at the table of the Lord of the hills and sky.
At least that’s how I see it.
But I don’t have to bend over the grill, and Rhonda does. It is just a hair too short and a hair too deep and she, a tall and handsome woman, must bend at the back to work its farthest reaches. I’ve noticed that over the years, as a matter of passing ergonomics, but it struck me Saturday morning early for the first time as a matter of personal discomfort.
There was no line, there were no people to speak of. The place was empty, the health department worried about social distancing at the cash register, and I had come for takeout, to eat on my tailgate in the late-winter drizzle of the parking lot. And Rhonda had a minute, and she said that she was tired. Not by the labors of a day, but by the labors of a lifetime, of her family tradition that makes possible the family traditions of so many others. Of the price she pays so that I, and others, may be happy making our annual visit to the pancake house. Of how long she can continue to pay that price.
That was the first it ever occurred to me. The one-sidedness of it, the selfishness of it. The taking without giving of it. Yes, I pay for the meal, but the experience, the connection, the joy I take from it makes the money what money really always is, a passing and meaningless trifle. While what I carry away, in my heart of far greater significance than in my belly, is enduring and precious and rich.
Driving north I thought about families and succession, and how blue-collar businesses pay the college tuitions of children who can seldom be content working blue-collar jobs, and how the economic strangulation of upstate New York has triggered a diaspora of our region, a potato famine of our day, that leaves no rising generation to take the baton of a passing day and way of life.
And, selfishly, like always, I thought of myself, and the impact of this phenomenon on my life and traditions, and how the ways of my family are dependent on the labors and sacrifices of other families. And how, as those families age and disperse, and there is no one to carry on their labors, the world to which I cling for stability and familiarity will pass, as all previous days have passed, into the oblivion of old ways lost.
Like up at Jerome’s, above Naples, where we go one day per autumn to pick grapes and marvel at the view and visit with Richie and Mary. But Richie died last year, the seventh generation of his family to farm that hill, and the kids all live up in the city, professionals, they and their kids, and nobody wants to come back to the farm. And that leaves Mary and a hillside of grapes and nobody to carry on, and seven generations may not be eight, and there may be no more jelly from those vines at our house.
And I can’t ask anyone to live 364 days so that I, on the 365th,may pick their grapes and admire their view and breathe in their air.
It works for me, but it doesn’t work for them.
Which is why, over the last couple of years, I have tried to get to Andy’s Subs as often as I can. Down in Hornell, diagonal from where my first wife worked at what then was the Sears, a couple of blocks over from the first newspaper I wrote for, on what once was a thriving Main Street in a now-forgotten railroad town.
I always get the large ham with everything. They may make other subs, I presume you can customize, but I never have and I never will. I want the large ham with everything. I know how it will taste, and I want it to taste that way. It’s a relic, really, from back when subs were rare and special and didn’t have to be that good. The roll is a little anemic and nondescript, with it can’t be more than two slices of pressed ham, a dusting of lettuce and tomato, lavish mayonnaise, some kind of a pepper relish and some grated parmesan. In terms of food cost, it can’t be very expensive to put together, but its combination, at the convergence of taste bud and memory bank, is always a delight to me.
But I fear it is going away. The lady who seems to be the boss talks often of selling or retiring, and they’ve closed on weekends and fairly early in the evening, and there aren’t many times that I’m off work that they’re open, and the future being uncertain I worry sometimes that each sporadic large ham with everything might be my last.
Like the salad of some years ago on the other end of Main Street at the old Sunset Inn. It was a house dressing, no more complex than some combination of oil and vinegar and pepper and salt, yet it was my favorite, in this old place started by my aunt’s people and where my mother worked when she got out of the state hospital. It was a joy, and over years I sometimes made trips just for the salad and the bread and to sit in those walls.
But the Sunset Inn is bulldozed and gone now in a metaphor of mortality, where not just things pass, but people, where we outlive some things we cherish but ultimately are outlived ourselves.
North, in Rochester, in the home of my life’s work, on another Main Street, in an exotic and palatial old train station, another family has labored for generations building other families’ traditions. Alex has bent over his own grill for most of his adult life, never really free to be the truck driver he dreamt of being, instead called by family responsibility to carry on where his father and grandfather labored, at the home of the Garbage Plate.
The real Garbage Plate. The one his family concocted and a region adopted, the one they put on the cable shows and line up for at college reunions, the one tied to benders and proposals and innumerable closing times for innumerable late-night hellraisers. The Garbage Plate my children and everyone in the diaspora craves and raves about, the sacred meal of their heritage and place. The one governors eat when they come to town, the one the few executives who still visit the city pose for selfies with. Seventeen-hundred calories of comfort and tradition, the signature food of Rochester. A touchstone of place.
But Alex is in his sixties, and he and his bride have health challenges, and both feel the lingering impacts of the wreck from years ago, when an illegal alien on a country road smashed into their car and lives. Alex has been tired for a while, and in recent years, since the city made them shut down their overnight hours and all the businesses went out of downtown, it’s been a tight operation, that’s only gotten tighter with the covid shutdowns. They’re serving about 100 fewer customers per day, and the average check has fallen from $13 to $8.50. The office groups and families, buying Garbage Plates, have gone away, and now it’s a trickle of neighborhood people, buying red hots and fries, or maybe burgers and fries, or maybe, counting carefully the quarters and dimes in their palm, just an order of fries. And maybe some of those customers come in with more need than money and walk out fed anyway. But either way, fewer customers, smaller orders, aching back, no rising generation to take over the place, it doesn’t add up.
And since Alex went on TV saying he was in trouble, there have been offers on the building. And thoughts about the future. So he has listed the building, and the business, and hopes someone will want them both.
And, selfishly, like always, I think of myself, remembering the Garbage Plates at my son’s wedding, the Garbage Plates on Christmas Eve that have been our family’s tradition for maybe 20 years, the steady and beloved presence of Alex behind the counter, doing good and thinking good and being there.
Being there at a benefit to me and a cost to him. Serving my family, but sapping his, taking the energy of
their lives to decorate and brighten the routine of ours. In a world where nothing lasts forever.
So I am eating what I can, and savoring both flavor and emotion, uncertain of tomorrow, but grateful for today.
The succession of generations and the decline of an economy, the dawning of a day different from the last. The realization that what has always been really hasn’t, nor will it always be.
But we stand at our grill and we work as we have, putting something of ourselves on the altar of service and stability, doing our duty until our day is done.