Dinner in stove to warm, killer good clam linguine. Dog sitting and have some time to write.
And I left the kitchen with a beer in a glass that my Mom showed me how to pour: “down the side, halfway up, in the middle”. She learned as a teenager, waiting tables in her Hungarian stepfather’s bar & restaurant, “Charlie’s Cafe”, an immigrant and workman’s saloon on Woodhill & Buckeye in east Cleveland , Ohio.
Charlie was a widower with a son, my Uncle Chuck. Married my Grandmother, Mary, a Hungarian immigrant divorcee.
Mom was 17 and waiting tables, when my 26 year old father walked in. Two weeks later, he drove her to Covington, Kentucky to get married. He swore, he was “shot down by a pair of 38’s”.
Later, with kids in a post WWII bedroom suburb, Mom worked weekend nights in a saloon near the factories, foundries and machine shops on Brookpark Road. To meet the bills. The old man hated it! She’d get $5 tips, multiple hours of current wages! Guys drinking on Fridays, after getting paid were generous with good looking waitresses!
I remember being half asleep in the backseat of a Hudson Wasp, in PJ’s, with a younger brother, to bring her home after her shift.
The minute they could get by without her tips, he forbade it. And for 54 years of marriage, till his last breath, he was wildly, completely, in love with her.
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