Mother’s Refrigerator Soup

It was the mid-60’s, and we were living in Missoula, Montana. My older brothers and I were having lunch together. I have four older brothers. My Mother had made a pot of her infamous Refrigerator Soup.

Refrigerator Soup was what she called the soup she made from whatever was left in the refrigerator. The flavours were always different, as they would vary depending on what was in the refrigerator. This particular batch was not so good.

I did not like it, but being the youngest on the totem pole, a description I should leave in the dusty stack section of my memories, I did not complain. We all knew it was not one of her better efforts, but in her defense, the poor woman had a husband who liked to pound the table, and five growing boys. Just cleaning the bathroom after their errant urination was more than enough to win the competition in her unfilmed version of Job’s lot in life.

My next oldest brother Kelly pushed away from the table, and announced that he was not going eat it. He said it was disgusting. A hush fell over the room. He had used his inner voice, expressing what we all were thinking, but in our innate Canadianess, were unable to express. We were all in shock, yet also awed by his bravery.

As a family, we were all capable of uncontrolled speech. From early ages, we learned to walk and talk at the same time. We learned to balance, walking on each other, overtalking just to get ourselves heard.

But none of us dared to speak those words aloud. Kelly did.

My next older brother Brent broke the silence, defending his Mother’s honour.

“If you are not going to eat it, then you are going to wear it!”

And with that, he picked up the steaming bowl of Mom’s botched hodge-podge soup, and poured it all over Kelly’s head. Kelly shrieked in pain, as the hot soup scalded his scalp. Then the room erupted into what Gunsmoke, my Nana’s favourite TV Western, would have called a bar fight. Screaming and shouting, wrestling, a regular dustup soup in a cup. Perhaps punches were thrown.

Now I am probably embellishing the facts here. Fancy that, spicing up memories with fanciful inventions? Since only one of brothers actually reads this “stack”, I mark myself safe from Fact Checkers.

My point, and I do have one, is that while we would inwardly complain, we all knew that nobody in their right mind would actually voice that discontent. I know for a fact that our Father was not there. I know that because, if he were there, he would have cuffed Kelly himself for the remark. Then he would have cuffed Brent for doing what he did, even though it was what he would have done. My Father had the self control of absent fathers.

In those days, we had many meals. Breakfast, brunch, lunch, supper, tea time, dinner, dessert, more tea time. Our favourite dessert was “bozadeez”, or both of these, as in do you want chocolate or vanilla? We want bozadeez.

We were a family of seven kids plus Mom and Dad. Catholic or careless? That was the cheeky question a colleague asked my Dad at a party. He was lucky the old man didn’t haul off and punch him. My Father did not know what self deprecating humour was. Or if he did, he did not practice it. Such was the standup routines of Canadian ex-pats. Sorry was the punchline. We learned to say what was on the top of our mind without regard for the others in the room.

It must be said my Mother was an excellent cook, but this batch of Refrigerator Soup was not one of her finer efforts.

Living in Missoula was a strange time. My father had moved our family from the foul smelling town of Port Alberni to the middle of nowhere—Big Sky Country, Montana.

Why? God knows. We can only guess. That is a question which will never be answered. My Father is gone on a trip. This time he is not coming back.

I know for a fact that he did not have a dream of becoming a dental floss tycoon, as Frank Zappa would later sing. The plywood mill in Missoula might have shared some ownership with the pulp mill in Port Alberni. For whatever reason, he cast our fate to the southern wind, and in the night, we crossed the border. We were aliens in a strange land.

This week, I was reading a hilarious post by Heather Havrilesky about Dubai Tacos. Her post, along with these memories, became fodder for my conversation with my counsellor from the Cancer Agency.

I was telling her how the word “senior“ rankled me. I much prefer the word Mature. I like to think that we gain wisdom, maturity and knowledge as we age. My now sober mind is primed to self reflection, so my wisdom grows in tandem with my short term memory loss. Winning some, losing some, dim sum. So much lucky.

As I explained, the refrigerator soup memory cemented my protective feelings for my Mother, my feelings of actual guilt if I didn’t enjoy her food, given her sacrifices. Because she sacrificed for us. At one point, in her Fifties, she went back to school just to prove to herself that she “still had a brain”. Of course, she excelled.

I was saying to my counsellor that I finally felt that I could give up that guilt, because my Mother was dead. She was gone now for at least 8 years. It feels more like 18 years, as all those years of dementia should be counted and considered.

I will allow myself to be mindful, but not held prisoner to these memories. I have often used, and beat myself up, for using the phrase “finding myself”. I would say, “I found myself” in a certain situation, acting as if I had no agency, and no self-determination.

Born without a purpose, mindfulness played no part in my planning for any said situation. Still, it has been with frequency that I find myself in situations, forcing myself to face the endless repetition of relearning the same life lessons. All because I did not learn the lesson the first time. At least, not well enough to remember, retain, and avoid repeating myself.

Not drinking has allowed me to break from some of these early routines.

“He often said he was a light sleeper, and until the middle of the night he was, but he usually slept soundly for several hours in the early morning hours, curled up on his side in a fetal position, his hands tucked between his thighs — and his pistol under the covers, not far from his hand, in case of trouble.” William S. Burroughs —Early Routines

I’ve not seen everything, I hope. I hope there is much more to see. But if hope is the bridge between desperation and struggle, then like most infrastructure, it is crumbling. We left hope in the hands of the wrong people.

People who overspent the family budget on War. People who let hope rot in the refrigerator. People of little faith who abandoned hope along with their parents, warehoused in the nursing homes. We have allowed ourselves to become more cynical, bringing us to a place where hope lost its meaning. We struggle to find hope in the deluge of daily darkness.

Hope is the metaphorical Refrigerator Soup, cobbled together with love and guilt, and old vegetables. And we must become the brave brother who pushes the bowl away, and also the other brother who defends his Mother’s honour, who declares that hope, like all good things in life, must be fought for, must be reinvented, must be made new.

It’s either that or we wear it.