Scents of Christmas past

By T.W. Burger

John Messina was always there for a few years, looming elegantly, joyously over Nana’s giant holiday dinners. As a kid, I could not figure out why he was always hanging around, bugging her and me for that matter. She was MY grandmother, after all. 

John was big, but fit and stood tall, more so than anybody at the dinners other than my dad. All the men in my family were or had been steelworkers and dressed at holiday dinners any factory workers on holiday...nothing fancy. 

John, on the other hand, was an understated dandy. The only ensemble I remember clearly was a three-piece suit of some hard-looking material in a brown very similar to that of the sedan-sized turkey towering  at the table’s center. His black hair, curly and perfectly coiffed, was shot through generously with white. 

As in many families, the occurrence of family dinners with our bunch came about through a baffling interplay of ability (meaning who could manage to extricate themselves from their own family entanglements), whose “turn” it was, and for all I know, the alignment of the stars. 

Whether at my aunts Shirley or Baba’s or Nana’s or, once, my Uncle Bing’s, there was absolutely nothing wrong with the food. But it was always a different kind of special at Nana’s.  Maybe it was grandmother magic. Well, a double dose of that, since Nana’s mother, my dad’s grandmother, lived with her, and had throughout Nana’s marriage. She was a sour old thing, but the two of them were terrific cooks. 

After the meal, when all the men and some of the women lit up their unfiltered cigarettes to fill Nana’s living room with bluish white smoke, John would haul out an enormous, expensive-looking cigar, the light glancing off a chunky gold ring on his right hand as he clipped the mouth end of the cigar with a special tool, and fired it off. 

Its smoke, white and thick, rose over the fumes of the Pall Malls and Chesterfields and smelled wonderful. 

Sometime later my mother and her sisters told me that Mr. Messina was in love with Nana and wanted her to marry him. Well, that he wanted to marry her. My family did not talk about love, at least not that I heard. Formal arrangements were easier, something to be contracted to paper, signed and notarized. None of that heaving bosom stuff, nossir.

Now that I am probably older than John was then, I am a lot more sympthetic. I wish I had been a little older and able to have gotten to know him better. My brother and I are the only ones still standing from those days. Sadly, I remember more about the food – the turkey, the mountain ranges of mashed potatoes, the Lake Erie-sized bowls of thick gravy – than I do about John or even many of the family. 

Most of those diners are gone now except for me and my brother. Nana’s house was sold after her death and converted into offices. I haven’t been back, though sometimes I think about it. 

From the busy road I have glimpsed the office remodel. Gone is the Chinese-themed wallpaper, the heavy German furniture. The grandfather clock-radio and the framed art print from the living room are in my house. All the other furnishings are scattered to wherever things like that go. 

I think a big reason I have shied away from going in the place is less than the fact it doesn't look like Nana’s house anymore, but that it now smells like an office. No wafting of turkey and gravy filling the air, or the smell of Nana’s self-scrounged cream of mushroom soup or fresh apple pies, the fruit harvested from the neighbor’s tree. Or maybe, if I really focused, the rich smell of a really good cigar.

T. W. Burger was raised in town and graduated from Athens High School in 1967, then worked as a driver of everything from fork trucks to garbage trucks and concrete mixers, has been an apprentice mortician and ambulance attendant.

Terry is now a semi-retired journalist who resides on the banks of Marsh Creek in Pennsylvania, just outside of Gettysburg.