ISBN: 9798218711191
Here are two memories of her father by Rosanne Bozzone, a neighbor and friend of editor Jim DeVoe’s in Lawrenceville, New Jersey.
Wild About Butter and Spice
"Ugh!”
I turn to look at my 84-year-old dad, who's peeking over my shoulder as I gather ingredients together for the cookies. He looks like he just ate capuzzelle, an Italian sheep's head delicacy even some of my mother's Sicilian relatives find repulsive.
"What do you mean?"
"I know you're making my favorite cookies, but I didn't know you have to make them with butter. Why do you have to make them with that stuff? Can't you use lard?"
Now I'm the one making a face.
"Daddy, are you kidding? Lard is pig fat. I can't imagine making a cookie with lard.”
"My mother used to make them with lard,”, he countered. “She was a good cook and lard is good. Besides, I'm not wild about butter."
I look at my German grandmother's recipe for pfeffernusse cookies that I inherited from my father's sister, Loretta. Handwritten and egg splattered, the well-used instructions list the many ingredients for this traditional cookie from Deutschland. Nowhere does it say to substitute lard for butter.
"What have you got against butter?" I ask as I shake a stick of the offending ingredient in question at my dad.
I know full well that my father has always hated butter. He doesn't care to know it's in his food. Doesn't like it on the table. Can't stand the thought of it. I also know the reason, but I want him to recollect why... to use his brain that is fast melting in an Alzheimer puddle. So I encourage him to retell the story that he's told me umpteen times. I hope he'll remember it this time too, just as he recalls that he doesn't like butter.
He smiles and shakes his head as if to clear it. His eyes take on the twinkle of humor that always accompanies the telling of this particular tale.
"It was 1922. I was 12. I needed to help my folks, so I got a job in the local German grocery store. Nothing fancy. Just stocking shelves and brining pickles in a barrel. One day, the shopkeeper gave me a new chore. I had to make fresh butter. Mr. Krause had an old churn that he had brought with him from Germany. It was made of wood, and it had a cover and a crank and maybe 6 or 8 wooden paddles inside. I poured the cream in the tub, closed the top, and cranked and cranked until the paddles turned as fast as I could make them and it was butter. Except, it wasn't. I don't know what I did wrong, but it didn't turn out right. Mr. Krause was so mad that I wasted all of his cream that he made me eat what I'd made until I threw up" … I wait for his next words which I know tickle his funny bone… “on him! I got fired and never ate butter again." Not waiting for my reaction to his story, he demands, "So are you going to put that stuff in my cookies?"
I am, and so I attempt to divert his attention.
"Daddy, how about you set the table and I'll call you when they're ready?"
Eager to help, he turns to get the dishes, stops, looks around in confusion and then sits down in his favorite place on the couch to read the newspaper. These days his absentmindedness is no longer surprising, just upsetting. I wonder how many pieces of my father I have to lose before his disease leaves us with no pieces at all.
Thinking of the steady downward drip of his faculties, I mash the butter and crack the eggs with more vigor than needed.
I look at Grandma Bertha's vague recipe measurements and try as always to approximate her "few" cups of flour, "pinch" of baking soda, "dollop" of molasses and "smidge" of salt. Scraping "some" lemon skin and grating "a little" orange rind is a mindless activity that calms me. I add "a cup of brown zuker", an egg, and "a turn" of ground pepper. After beating the contents of the bowl into submission, I chill the sticky dough. In 20 minutes, I roll the easier-to-handle mixture into little spheres.
My deceased mother's oven creaks as I open the door and slide the cookies inside.
An aromatic blend of cinnamon and ginger fills the room as 37 uneven dough balls brown to perfection. I remove the hot treats, wait a few minutes, roll the cooled confections in powdered sugar and allspice, and call out,
"Daddy, time for tea and cookies."
"You made cookies? I didn't know you were making cookies. Why didn't you tell me? I would have helped you."
I sigh and don't remind him that he knew.
He shuffles over to smell the cookies.
"Ah, pfeffernusse! My favorite!"
Always amazed that he can remember some things and not others, I shake my head and set two places at the table.
It's just the two of us in my parents' two room apartment that is attached to our house. The kids are still at school, my husband TJ’s at work, and my mom, who passed away three months ago, leaves an empty place around their yellow Formica table. That my father no longer remembers the love of his life is a curse and a blessing which leaves me both devastated and relieved.
I take comfort that most of the time, he remembers me.
We sit.
Except for the munching, the silence is overwhelming.
After a few slurps of tea, my dad speaks.
"Oh, Sweetheart, did you know that these are my favorite cookies? You didn't make them with butter, did you? I'm not wild about butter. Did I ever tell you the story about the time I made butter?"
As the familiar story unfolds again, I sip my tea and take a bite of buttery pfeffernusse. Too spicy for me. I reflect that although I have never enjoyed these little brown balls of butter and spice, I will continue to make them long after my dad is gone, for they will forever remind me of his love.
Legacy: Notes On the Wall
“Laurence, did you finish practicing already? I don’t hear you!”
Even though she died three weeks before I was born, I can almost hear my Grandmother Bertha Hettesheimer yelling at my dad.
“Where are you? You left your violin on the table. You need to put it back in the velvet cloth and then place it in the case. And take care of the bow!”
My father, at age five in 1915, says he always answered his mom the same way. “Yes, Mother, I just finished and I will put the violin away in a minute.”
The truth, he told me, was that he pushed the hands of the clock ahead with his bow to fool my grandmother into thinking that that he had practiced the required hour before he went out to play. I’m not sure how he pulled that off each day, but he swore he did.
Years later in a fit of nostalgia, he would attempt to play that ancient relic. We were all very glad when he wrapped it up and put it back in the closet.
There it remained until a visit from my cousin Augustine prompted its resurrection.
One of nine children of my mother’s sister Mary, Augie was a barber. Mary’s husband, my Uncle Sal who had been the first LoPrinzi to be a barber, believed that “all you kids need to work. You can do anything else in your life that you want to but learn how to be a barber and you’ll always have work.”
So all of the kids became barbers in Uncle Sal’s shop in Flemington, New Jersey. 60 years later, some of them are still barbers. One became a teacher, another an airplane pilot, and all of them were successful and had varied interests, but only Augie was responsible for the rebirth of my father’s violin.
Surreptitiously making guitars in the back room of his barber shop, Augie crafted fine guitars, violins and ukuleles. Nowadays, his guitars are world-renowned. In fact, one of his most prized possessions is a 1966 picture of the late virtuoso Andres Segovia playing one of his guitars. Mine is the memory of the joy on my dad’s face when Augie fixed his beat-up violin. It’s Ironic that Dad forgot he hated to play and from that moment on all he wanted to do was entertain us with his newly refurbished instrument’s squeaks and squawks. Augie could work miracles with the violin but could do nothing about the expertise of its owner.
My father would exclaim, “See how wonderful my new violin is?”
I miss those days when Dad would try to ply his so-called craft in between caring for my disabled mom and trying to take care of me.
Since his passing nearly 20 years ago, memories of Dad tenderly plucking the catgut strings of his violin are etched permanently in my mind.
His kindness and love toward all echo forever in the legacy of his violin…
… which lives on my wall.
Laurence James Hettesheimer (1910-2001) was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. In an effort to support his mom, younger brother and two sisters after the death of his father, Larry went to work for the Fidelity and Deposit Company of Maryland at the age of 15. Throughout his life, Larry was fond of recounting the years that he was office boy to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who at that time served as vice-president and director of F & D. A veteran of World War II, Corporal Hettesheimer married Rose LoPresti in 1946. He returned to F & D after the war where he remained in the accounting and judicial departments until he retired after 50 years of service.
Larry loved his wife, daughter, son-in-law, grandsons, gardening, and the Yankees.
Roseann Bozzone is a retired teacher, wife, and mother. Born in Brooklyn, NY, she graduated from CUNY Brooklyn College with a degree in English Literature and Education and enjoyed postgraduate studies in English and American literature. After several years of teaching middle school in Brooklyn, she left teaching to work as an overseas consultant for American Express. She married T.J. Bozzone in 1973 and they moved to Lawrenceville, New Jersey in 1985 where she returned to teaching after the birth of her two sons.
A contributor to THE MAGIC OF MEMOIR, edited by Linda Joy Meyers and Brooke Warner, Roseann is an amateur photographer, loves ferrets and frogs, and enjoys international and local travel.