Grief tastes like a rarebit sandwich

My late father was a boisterous person most of the time, but like comedians, the attitude was a torch to fend off the dark. Occasionally, in bouts of lingering grief, he would wrap me up in a tradition of his late parents, whom I never had the privilege to know. On cold evenings, while my mother worked night shifts, he would stand at the stove making a roux and detail how his mother wasn’t much of a cook, but her favorite food was a rarebit sandwich. I’d watch his burly hands reach in and out of the broiler, toasting the slices of bread.

“How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Reach your bare hands into the oven! I’ve seen you grab cookies right out of a 350 degree oven, too!”
“Practice!” and with a crinkled nose and his tongue slightly poking out he’d focus on pouring the umami cheese sauce over the toast and popping the whole dish back under the broiler.

I’d sit on the couch with my elevated TV dinner and feel my father missing his mother from his armchair and self-medicating with a black and white movie. I had heard some of the lore around my grandmother, and while I enjoyed each simple bite, I was grateful my own mother’s recipe book was thicker than a page. I always wondered if it made him feel better or worse when he ate it, but he wouldn’t have answered such a question for a twelve year old. Unfortunately I never remembered to ask him.

However, I knew she was on his mind as he constantly prayed for the repose of her soul. He’d tell me how much I looked like her. Randomly one day while I was studying abroad he emailed me this:

Hope all is going well, yesterday was your Grandma Kay’s 95th birthday – you would have liked her a lot, you’re a lot alike.

Love,
Papa

My heart broke a little bit. And now it breaks even more.

My great-grandfather came to America in 1907, before the liberation of Ireland and during a strange time of cultural promotion and labor unrest. However, America wasn’t exactly welcoming of the Irish. It was hard for the Irish to get into more elite places (think universities and white collar employment) and there was still discrimination for less “skilled” labor (including newspaper ads for nannies that ended with “No Irish Need Apply”). In fact, the origin of aesthetic nose jobs was to help specifically Irish, black, and Jewish Americans hide their ethnicities. One Atlantic article details:

Roe's rhinoplasty, Gilman tells us, was conceived as a remedy for the pug nose, which branded so many recent immigrants as Irish. The Irish physiognomy was regarded as "servile," inspiring analogies to dogs (hence the name "pug"). Measured against the standard of the English nose in Britain or the German nose in America, the Irish nose was too short. The Irish nose and the Jewish nose and the African nose were all alike, Gilman writes, in that they represented difference. (The irony, of course, is that by the middle of the twentieth century the pug nose had become the ideal, as we are reminded by the face of every woman who underwent rhinoplasty in the 1960s.)

It only goes to show the fickle winds of beauty trends (although an Aussie wrote to me that it’s called a Pig Nose where she lives. Button, pug, pig, who can even keep up with this?). When my great-grandpa came to the US, some of his contemporaries were getting plastic surgery to hide their Irish noses, and by the time he died, Pug Noses had become the Disney Princess Nose. How interesting for him to see his daughters culturally fit a mold that his wife could not.