When I was a small child, I used to watch my grandfather cook in his huge airy kitchen. He was old and bent with a jaunty cap sitting sideways over unruly hair. He would blend ingredients into tasty pastas, gravies and other Italian delights. I loved his kitchen. Sitting next to him, I could smell the room as it filled with the aroma of herbs, spices, baking bread and the sweet scent of early morning whiskey on his breath. Along the wall, rows of pasta noodles hung drying on broomsticks. This was my classroom with my grandfather. Often we would wait for just the right smell or bubbling sound, then he would pinch the perfect amount of a spice with his two fingers and toss it into the boiling pot.
While we waited he filled me with lore, stories from long ago. In his youth, my grandfather was a tyrant. An immigrant from Italy, he was a handsome man who lived life large while ignoring his family of seven children and a wife who did not speak English, unless he was violent or cruel. When I knew him though, he was 83, bent with age, his earlier life only a memory.
He never spoke of those days, he only spoke of herbs and tomatoes, blending into spaghetti sauce with hand made sausages simmering and bobbing in the large pot. He would say, “Louisett, listen,” while bending down as though getting ready to tell me a secret, “when you buy sausage from the butcher they grind up the meat.” Then raising his hand he would pretend to wipe his nose, slip his fingers through his hair and return them to the sausage implying there was more than meat in those links, then he would wink at me.
My mother knew him one way, I knew him another and yet we were both right. There is only grey, nothing is really black or white. We find our hearts in the grey places where ambiguity and grace fill the space, this is the place where the heart lives.
Find your grey space and settle in – then let your heart grow on its own.
-Lou