Münster Cheese

I was shopping at Trader Joe’s, and looking for some cheese. My wife is out of town, and so I indulge (much to my stepdaughter’s amusement) in things like chips and cheese. Not just a decorous three crackers with a bit of cheese and some kind of herbal garnish to lend it an air of artisanalship (?) but a quarter of a bag of chips and a quarter of a however much they sell cheese in of cheese.

Pretty awful, and I tire of it after a couple of days, but I get it out of my system.

Anyway, I decided I wanted to buy some münster cheese (muenster, to you). Sadly, you can’t always find it in blocks. I had to buy it in pre-sliced bits. But I thought how much my old mom loved münster. And other bland foods – yogurt, cottage cheese. Dairy with a little tang in it. She had one of those Oster yogurt makers. She thought it was the most amazing device. You start with a bit of boughten yogurt, and the device is an incubator. The culture grows, and you make more and more.

And I missed her, and I wept a little bit in the store, looking at the cheese shelf, with its slabs of yellow and white and occasionally mottled bricks and wedges. She would have been so relieved to see me happily married to a beautiful, brilliant, prickly wife, with two beautiful, funny stepchildren. Yes, she would have rolled her eyes at my stepson and what he is into, but she would have loved him, as we all do. And she would have appreciated his kindness and wit. And she would have been impressed with, and jealous of, my stepdaughter.

Beauty was 85% of everything for my mother. There was room for other virtues – intelligence, kindness, ruthlessness, energy, focus, “talent”… but mainly, it was beauty. And high heels.

Just yesterday, or the day before, Bel Kaufmann’s (sp?) obituary ran in the Times. My mother knew, and admired, Bel. Bel lived to 103, and when my mom knew her, six years ago, Bel wore high heels and ballroom danced. My mother, a former Great Beauty, was bent and crippled with arthritis, osteoporosis, and pointless desperate surgery. If a doctor had a head of hair and an accent, and any optimism at all (and they tend to have that), she would go under the knife.

As it turned out, surgery didn’t agree with her. Poor thing. I miss her.

And I thought of my father, too. And wondered… As happy as my mom would be to see me now, undeservedly prosperous, with a loving family and an interesting job (her dad, she said, worked on the team that designed the Lunar Module’s feet, basing them, she was delighted to know, on camel’s feet … they can walk on sand, you see). My father, however he would have been impressed by my nice house and pretty stepkids, he would have been annoyed at my doing a job he didn’t quite understand.

If there’s any way I am better than him, and there are few, one of them is if there is something I don’t understand, I am delighted at something else to learn. He was a little ashamed at anything he didn’t understand. He felt it belittled him – that people wouldn’t “respect” him as much.

Poor thing. I feel bad for his fear and continual attempts to look important. He was generous to me, when I had troubles, and I had a couple. He tried to help any way he could. He would give money generously, understanding that one twist of international affairs, one lurch in the economy, one belch of antisemitism, and he’d have nothing, just as his family had lost everything so many times. Only through talent and artistry did they manage, and they managed pretty well.

As do I, I suppose. I like to think he would have learned to respect both my children, even if they didn’t act fascinated by him. I like to think he would have found that generosity within him.

Anyway, here’s to mommy and daddy – münster cheese and salty chips. They lived quite well.