I inherited my friendship with Mike Elsner from my father, who’d been friends with Mike’s dad for about thirty years. Sid and Dad met at Ohio State, where both took journalism classes en route to becoming working journalists. Sometimes I wonder if I wasn’t at least as close to Sid as I was to his son.
I slept over a lot when I was a kid. I loved the more “lived in” feel of the Elsner house. Nothing was neat as a pin. T-shirts and jockey shorts were shoved in a drawer in an unfolded jumble. You might have to make your own dinner, as Jean, Mike’s mom, spent time on a lounge chair in the living room reading magazines and smoking L&Ms, and was not an avid cook. That was fine, as one of the delights of the Elsner house was to traipse downstairs and open up a huge freezer locker Sid had installed, and therefrom pluck a delight unbeknownst to the Gitlin house, such as a TV dinner or pot pie or luscious chocolate-covered éclair, having now only to use the oven or wait for thawing. Food at the Elsner house was always better. Everything was better. I once called my mother on the phone from the Elsners’, proclaiming, “The milk’s even better here!” Turns out Mom and Jean got the same milk, from the same milk man.
I think about food when I remember the Elsner house. Sid made me and Mike breakfast once, a breakfast I’d never had before. It’s stayed with me forever. Blueberry pancakes, with real maple syrup out of a tin from Vermont, and bacon. We always just had cereal at my house, sometimes eggs. I’d encountered Log Cabin and Mrs. Butterworth, but nothing like this. Don’t get me wrong. There was nothing shabby about Mom’s poached eggs on toast. But that big, exotic breakfast Sid fashioned on the stove top, amidst the warming clutter of that kitchen, using something I’d never seen before, a cast-iron pan, transcended all previous breakfasts for this goggle-eyed, slavering visitor.
It is Sid with whom I associate the main warmth of the house, but he was the butt of jokes and derision from his three sons and wife. He was angry a lot, made imperious demands. So the boys rallied around her. Couldn’t have been as bad as my father’s weird rages, provenance ever unknown. Sid worked as an editor at Cleveland’s big newspaper, The Plain Dealer, and came home wanting things just right. A corpulent man, he was powerful; he once was so angry he broke a wooden cutting board, slamming it against a tabletop.
One night I was over there with Mike when we heard a roar downstairs.
“Oh shit,” Mike said and ran down to the kitchen, where his father bawled him out. Turns out Mike hadn’t thawed the lamb chops for when Sid got home from work. Mike skulked blackly back upstairs, muttering how he hated his father.
I blush to report I had the shamelessness to enquire: “So … can we still make something to eat?”
Still red from Sid’s rebuke, Mike glanced at me with a mixture of simmered anger and fresh incredulity. “He said we could have peanut butter, is all.”
Mike was flabbergasted when I went down there. We’d planned on making TV dinners, probably salisbury steak, my favorite.
But a creamy Peter Pan on Millbrook would do just fine.
Sid was in the kitchen when I got there. I could feel the lessening steam.
He was calm and affectionate as he bade me sit at the kitchen banquette and, with him serving me, have the peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk. I did feel a mite embarrassed, but something about the ritual felt right, like Mike’s dad and I were cementing our own bond.
I guess I faced the danger of an angry Sid because, deep down, I wasn’t afraid of him. I understood him. Yes, he was irascible, but I felt sorry for how he was always the outcast in the household, standing as he did outside the closed corporation of Jean and Mike and the two older sons and their collective rebuke.
One of the things about Sid that might have made him laughable was that, every time he had a birthday, he invited people over, or maybe it was just the immediate family, but the thing is, he gave them presents. When I first heard this it made me sad. Like Sid figured nobody’d throw him a party or get him anything, so he used the day to buy into the affections of others.
I don’t think that anymore.
I’m having people over for a little 70th birthday party, celebrating my descent into senescence, and they are forbidden to bring gifts.
“I just want friends over,” I said on the phone. “Barb and a girlfriend are cooking Mexican, so there’ll be great food. All you gotta do is sing happy birthday when I blow out the candles.”
It is better to give than to receive. I’m not going so far as to give them stuff like Sid did, but it’s in the same spirit, it’s about them. Not about greedy little me getting things.
Anyway, it’s not like I’m some eight-year-old wanting a GI Joe or a slingshot or a yo-yo. Friendship is enough.
Cactus Man's Blog 