I was poking through the bookshelves in the Trinity Episcopal Church Thrift Shop a few weeks before Christmas, and I turned up this handsome booklet, which was published in 1947 by the United Fruit Company. The cover, reproduced as a full spread here, shows a nice big hand of bananas in a pressed-glass banana stand, an item that became popular in the 1890s, the booklet tells us, when bananas first became widely available. I like the almost-symmetry of this cover; if you look at just the front cover, it is particularly striking. The design is elegant and simple, especially compared to most food-company cookbooks. But the interior is a sheer descent into madness.

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Every family has their little holiday traditions. We certainly had plenty—Dad would read A Christmas Carol aloud to us kids, as a result of which I had big chunks of it memorized by the time I was in high school. We all worked together under his direction to make platters of egg rolls to give as gifts—no Chinese restaurant can ever come close to my dad’s egg rolls. My mother made sausage rolls. We usually cut the tree ourselves, often at the last minute. We kids made a stocking for Mom and Dad, and when we woke up before dawn on Christmas, there would be a bulging kneesock by each of our beds, filled with chocolate coins and assorted little items and—always—a tangerine and a quarter in the toe.

According to the note on the flyleaf, this little book made its first appearance in our family on Christmas 1978. My mother undoubtedly found it either at a yard sale or at our favorite store, the St. Vincent De Paul Thrift Shop, which means she probably paid 19 cents for it.

Each of the stories in this book starts out as your standard, heart-warming Christmas story of magic and good deeds, then takes a sharp U-turn at the end, winding up with exploding lightbulbs, adulterous elves, and Rudolph’s flabby laurels. more…

Robertson’s was the big department store in downtown South Bend when I was growing up. It is firmly wedged in my memory, to the point where I still dream about it sometimes. My favorite part was the mezzanine. The book department was on your right as you went up the stairs, and on the left was a luncheonette that served things like club sandwiches, which seemed terribly exotic to me. There was also a bargain basement, with cheap clothes and such, in contrast with the more opulent fare upstairs.

This catalog makes Robertson’s seem much more fancy than it actually was. Certainly the cover line “The store of a million gifts,” was an exaggeration. But I used to linger over each page to deliberate over which item I would choose, given the option. Except the yard of cheese—I got away from that as quickly as possible. Here’s a sample of the delights within.

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Tomás Takes Charge, by Charlene Joy Talbot, was my absolute favorite book when I was a kid. It was my sister’s favorite, too, and my kids loved it when I read it to them. You won’t find it on too many lists of the classics, but for some reason it’s like catnip to my family.

To begin with, it’s the sort of story kids love, about a brother and sister living by their wits in an abandoned apartment in New York City. Don’t we all dream of leaving Mom and Dad and the backyards of suburbia and somehow making it on our own? It’s sort of like an urban version of the Boxcar Children. But it was Talbot’s straightforward writing and her eye for the telling detail that really brought this book to life for me.

In the story, Tomás and Fernanda, ages 10 and 14, are motherless children who are left completely alone when their father doesn’t come home from work. After a few days, a kindly neighbor gets involved and arranges for the children to be taken away by Welfare. To avoid this dreadful fate, Tomás and Fernanda make up a story about going to stay with their godmother in Brooklyn but really they just move to an empty apartment on the boarded-up upper floor of a nearby building. Tomás scavenges for food and other items on the street, while Fernanda, who is agoraphobic and won’t go out, takes care of the place.

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This little book, which I picked up in the Caritas thrift shop in Geneva years ago, suddenly seems relevant again. It was published in 1942 as a guide for housewives contending with shortages and rationing during World War II; my edition, which is clearly translated from German, was apparently a premium from the Compagnie Genevoise des Tramways Electriques.

Switzerland was not a direct participant in World War II, of course, but as all the surrounding countries were at war, they experienced shortages and rationing just as their neighbors did. (Also, the Swiss have a bit of a bunker mentality—to this day, residents are required to keep certain food rations on hand at all times, more as a hedge against inflation than to ward off starvation.)

This little book actually packs quite a bit of information into a small space. The author, Madame Helen Guggenbuhl, includes instructions on how to can, dry, and pickle food, remake clothing to accomodate changing sizes as you lose weight, and make soap substitutes out of things like beef trimmings, potato peels, and ashes.

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My father died on September 16, after a long journey through the many stages of Alzheimer’s disease. His final decline started on a Thursday evening and ended on the following Tuesday morning. During that time, I read to him from the works of Robert W. Service and St. Faustina, who are as odd a couple as you will ever find, even at a deathbed.

Robert W. Service wrote poems about prospectors in the Arctic. Dad always enjoyed tales of manly adventure; his favorite short story, which he read to all of us at one point or another, was Leiningen Versus the Ants. The image of the ants throwing themselves into the gasoline moat, sacrificing themselves to form a bridge for the others, has stuck with me ever since.

Likewise, Service’s two poems The Cremation of Sam McGee and The Shooting of Dan McGrew are also part of my permanent mental canon. Dad would adopt an aw-shucks attitude when he talked about Service, remarking that he wasn’t fashionable because his poems rhymed. They do stick in your head, though, thanks to a galloping anapestic meter that takes over your brain, and Dad could recite big chunks of both poems from memory. When he got stuck on a line, he would take down his red and yellow paperback anthology and look it up. We had several editions of Robert Service’s poetry, including a deluxe illustrated version of The Shooting of Dan McGrew, but this paperback is the one I associate with Dad.

As for St. Faustina, Dad discovered her when she was still just a Blessed, and he was very taken by her message. Just as Dad was the more indulgent parent in our family, Faustina was all about the Divine Mercy, so they were soul-mates of a sort. He had a special wooden rosary on which he said the chaplet of St. Faustina, which is a quicker version of the rosary that substitutes single verses for the Hail Marys and Our Fathers.

There is actually a store in South Bend that specializes in Faustinaiana, and Dad liked to go there to stock up on pamphlets. I took him there shortly after my mother died. I thought the place was kind of droll—they had posted e-mails of the Blessed Virgin’s latest messages from Medugorje—but the guy behind the counter was friendly and listened with apparent interest as Dad told him all about how he met and married my mother.

A few months later, Dad had a subdural hematoma and needed emergency brain surgery. After that episode he lost his long-term memory and never really got it back. I tried saying a rosary with him a few times, figuring that the familiar, repetitive prayers might touch a chord, but it didn’t work. He just looked puzzled, as he did when the priest came to give him Communion. So I gave it up.

As he was dying, though, I dug out the St. Faustina book and found his wooden rosary. I closed the curtain around his bed and said the chaplet with him. The prayers were unfamiliar to me, and I stumbled a bit at first, but eventually I got into the rhythm. Repeating the same short verses over and over again was calming and consoling for me, although I don’t know if they reached Dad or not. Over the course of the next few days, my sisters and brother and I said the chaplet with him several more times, singly and together. We said it one last time with him shortly before he died, and we buried him with his wooden rosary twined around his fingers.

Last week we had “reading day” on Sunday. It was my daughter’s suggestion, as both she and her sister had only done about half their summer reading, and the first day of school was looming. We didn’t set aside the whole day, just the early afternoon, but it was great and really peaceful—the two girls in the living room reading their books, George and I on the screen porch enjoying the luxury of leisure reading. Usually I don’t let myself sit down and read until bedtime, and then I fall asleep right away. It was a real treat to have a couple hours of clear-eyed, wide-awake time to really focus on what I was reading.

So we’re doing it again this week, more by default than declaration: After lunch, everyone fell into a book. I took the oppportunity to attack the stack of old New Yorkers and read two really nice articles. I expected All the Answers, by Charles Van Doren, to be a straightforward narrative of his experiences as America’s most famous quiz-show cheater; instead, it was a really touching story of family solidarity, forgiveness, and redemption. Van Doren presents himself as surprisingly diffident in the story, never really admitting to knowingly doing anything wrong and not particularly tortured about it, either. But he is surrounded by people who are much wiser than he is, chiefly his father and his wife, who set him straight. The other article, Hungry Minds, is Ian Frazier’s account of his work running a writer’s workshop in a soup kitchen in Chelsea’s Church of the Holy Apostles. I usually hate these writers’ workshop stories, but this was less about the workshop and more about the soup kitchen, and how it affected the church’s evolution, so it was actually pretty interesting. And the article is chock-full of great anecdotes; my favorite is when he runs into a soup-kitchen guest who is not impressed by the writers’ workshop because he attended one run by John Cheever when he was in Ossining. Good stuff.

I don’t usually do memes, but I saw this little guy sitting on the fence in my garden and decided to make him pay for his lunch.

When I was 12 or 13, I was fascinated by all things Irish, and I read a lot of Irish literature. At some point, my parents decided that James Joyce was Not Suitable, and I was forbidden to read his works. So every morning I would set my alarm clock for the unspeakably early hour of 6:30 a.m. and sneak downstairs before anyone else was up so I could read a short story from this copy of Dubliners, jumping every time the stairs creaked for fear of being caught. When I had read the story, I would carefully insinuate the book back into its place in the living room bookcase so no one would notice it had been disturbed. Whether because of the anxiety or the passing of time, I can’t remember a single word of this book.

Ironically, if they had caught me they probably wouldn’t have cared. Most likely they were worried about Joyce’s later works, not Dubliners. But I did get that thrill of the forbidden.

(One more scan from the Betty Crocker New Boys and Girls Cook Book)

I used to see eggplant in the supermarket when I was a kid, but I could never figure out what people did with it. It was a complete unknown to me: What did it look like under the skin? Which part did you eat? Where did the eggs come into it? All this remained a mystery, because we literally never had eggplant in our house.

Eventually I learned that this was no accident.

My father’s mother, whom he called “Ma,” was an excellent cook. In fact, she was a professional cook before she married my grandfather (”Pa”), and although there were eight kids in the family, and it was the Depression, the food was always plentiful and good.

Breaded pork chops were one of Ma’s particular accomplishments. Nobody makes breaded pork chops any more, because they are pretty much the definition of unhealthy food, and that’s a shame. Ma taught my mother to make them, and they were one of our favorite foods when we were growing up. After my sister got married, her in-laws used to drive 100 miles from the Chicago suburbs to South Bend just to have Mom’s breaded pork chops.

Back to Dad’s childhood trauma: One day, probably in the late 1930s, Dad sat down at the dinner table to what appeared to be a large platter of breaded pork chops. No one told him otherwise, so it wasn’t until he bit into one that he discovered that his mother was trying a new dish: breaded eggplant.

From that moment on, eggplant was anathema to him. We never, ever had it in our house, not even in the vegetarian-friendly 1970s, which were arguably the glory days of eggplant. The first time I ate eggplant, I was in graduate school. A guy who was trying (unsuccessfully as it turned out) to win my affections fixed me a big pan of eggplant parmesan from his family’s traditional recipe.

And reader, I loved it.