Norman Cote
This past week would have been my grandfather's 85th birthday. He died in 2011 from Alzheimer's. He was truly an amazing grandfather and father, and I think everyone in my family is grateful for all that he instilled in us and passed along. This week, I decided to post an essay I wrote about my grandfather in 2009, when his symptoms began to worsen and become truly visible to me. I was really invested in creative nonfiction at the time and was writing nearly nonstop. I loved the subject (me) accessibility and ease of expression, and I think I wrote to better understand my life.
Norman Cote, June 5th, 2011, 6 months before he died.
Once Mastered, Long Forgotten
One thing’s changed at the Thanksgiving holiday celebrated by my family. My mother still wakes early to place the turkey in the oven and slave in the kitchen to prepare all the traditional Thanksgiving fixings: mashed potatoes with just a little bit of skin remaining to add some texture, bread stuffing, carrots and turnips, squash, etc. Football still plays on the television all throughout the day. My aunt, my mother’s older sister, still arrives 45-minutes to an hour late in her jam packed, maroon mini-van, toting along my uncle, my two younger cousins, my grandmother and grandfather, nearing their eighties they prefer not to the drive the long distance from Rhode Island, cans of pickles, olives, baby spears of corn, and pickled onions that will fill a platter to be picked at before, during, and after our feast, my grandmothers legendary meat stuffing, and of course, her moist, dense, lightly powdered rum cake for dessert. My other uncle, my mother’s younger brother who lives only a few towns over, arrives well before my aunt. Along with him are his three children, all excited to play with their Rhode Island cousins, whom they don’t see nearly enough. My mother’s other brother, the youngest in the Cote family, who’s rarely seen and who’s voice is only heard on his answering machine, may or may not show up in his rusty, old, Grateful Dead stickered, Volkswagen camper, along with his wife and overly energetic and undisciplined child.
My house is always warm against the cold, dry autumn air on the other side of our walls. A bouquet of freshly lit fall-scented candles, a warm fire in the fireplace, and the plump, juicy turkey roasting in the oven, all mesh together into a nostalgic scent I wish I could bottle up for the times I miss home the most. Being used only a handful of occasions throughout the year, Thanksgiving being one of them, the dining room table is beautifully set, a result of my mother collecting magazine clippings and planning neurotically the previous four weeks. The place settings and fresh autumn-flowered centerpiece, radiates the many dirty hues of burgundy, ochre, honey, and slate, reflecting the colors out the window. The falling sun creeps through the nearly barren trees making up the small forest in my backyard, barely spraying enough of it’s warm light into the room and over the set table.
Once everyone has arrived, hugs and hellos have been exchanged, and drinks of wine, scotch, the rare vodka tonic, and soda for the kids, have been poured, the snacking begins. Warm bread-wrapped, cranberry-stuffed, baked Brie is freshly pulled from the oven and quickly dug into by an array of plain, peppered, or sesame water crackers by all those who have fasted since breakfast. My younger cousins pick at the pickle platter, more specifically the pitted black olives that fit perfectly on their juvenile little finger tips. A second cheese platter is set aside, ready to go once the baked Brie has been solely devoured.
After two or three helpings standing around in the kitchen, individual plates will be concocted and my family will then split up into four distinct groups. One group consists of all those under the age of 18. This is all but one of my cousins. They’ll run into the family room at the far end of the house to play whatever it is they play. No one cares as long as it involves everyone, keeps them entertained, doesn’t break anything, and most importantly, no one gets hurt.
Another group is made up of all men over the age of 50. Here, my two uncles will help my grandfather down to the couch in the living room. My stepfather will already be seated in “his chair” sipping a scotch on the rocks, probably his second, and snacking on a small paper plate, decorated with red and orange autumn leaves, of crackers and cheese. They’ll all watch the football game that’s been playing on the television since the Macy’s Parade ended; every year my sister insists on “watching” it. The two teams playing don’t matter; Thanksgiving and football is an American tradition. These guys swear it’s written somewhere in the Constitution. They’ll talk about work, their jobs, work, and well, their jobs. There’ll be an occasional burst of laughter at an orated joke or an explosion of ire over a bad call during the game.
All the pre-, peri-, and post-menopausal women compose another group. Here my aunt and grandmother will hang around the kitchen as my mother continues to cook or reheat all the components of our feast. They’ll insist on helping her, but she’ll incessantly decline. Soon she’ll become angered and annoyed by their overbearing gesture. This, and the combination of slaving over a hot stove, in the confines of our kitchen with an oven cranked up to 350 degrees, and the panic of thinking she forgot something, will send her into an inevitable hot flash, thus legitimizing her position in this group. She’ll make it known that she is going through menopause, and if we want to enjoy our meal, we have to deal with the bitter, late November air pouring into the house from the four or five open windows intended to cool her down.
The last group is all those who don’t fit into the other three groups. This is my oldest cousin of 19, my sister of 24, and me of 21. We’ll mingle between the three groups: occasionally playing with the kids in the family room or answering similar questions about school, our jobs, and our friends that come up during our conversations with our extended family members. We’ll have to utilize our long perfected, family gathering faux laugh as banal jokes and comments are made, confirming that Bob Dylan was right: the times really are changing. After making it through the adults, we’ll chat with each other about anything and everything: how many days until our yearly trip to Maine or what we’re hoping to get for Christmas, just to name a few. Anything as long as it keeps us distracted so that we don’t pursue the cell phones in our pockets like heroin addicts on the street itching for our next fix, needing to check if we might have felt a vibration indicating a new text or missed call.
Finally at around 3:30, having long finished snacking on the now cold Brie and pickled vegetables, finished our twice-refilled drinks, and grown secretly bored with the extended family, the turkey is done. The little plastic timer stuffed deep into the breast has popped nearly to the minute of the five hours that was instructed to cook all 18-plus pounds of it. Donning oversized oven mitts and her dirtied apron, my mother removes the turkey and places it on our wooden potholders on the kitchen counter. Here it will rest. As it does, the turkey’s hearty, lustful scent will spread throughout the house and everyone will slowly begin to migrate into the kitchen, sensing the time to take his or her respective seat at the dining room table is nearing. It is rare that we are all together, healthy and happy, able to enjoy a grand and fortunate feast as one. But before we take our seats, the turkey needs to be carved, something we all gather around to watch. For as long as I can remember carving the turkey was my grandfather’s job. It had to be.
*
After classes, during his high school years, my grandfather would scurry off to his part time job at the local butcher shop. Under the precise and delicate eye of his mentor, he learned all the ins and outs of butchery: the meats, the cuts, and everything in between. But what he learned most was that he had a passion for something: butchery. His part-time position lead to a full-time position once he graduated high school. But a few years later he found himself entering the Navy, spending almost all his time enlisted at sea. Of course he was busy on ship, leaving him no time to think about his future and his plans upon discharge. Worst of all, while he was at sea, he lost all sight of his dream of one day owning his own butcher shop.
When he finally returned he was abruptly greeted with the reality of a wife, whom he married weeks before leaving, their honeymoon was the drive from Rhode Island to Virginia where he boarded ship, and a 10-month-old baby girl. It was the start of a family he always wanted. At the time in the mid 1950’s, the man was expected to take care of his family by earning a healthy living, while the woman cared for the family at home. Having forgone a college degree after high school, he decided to apply to Bryant College where he would seek a business degree. He was accepted and prepared to go when at the last minute he thought better and decided again pass on college. He remembered the enthusiasm and energy he had working in the butcher shop prior to his time in the Navy. So he quickly applied for an open butcher position at the local Stop & Shop and I can only imagine how excited he must have been when he received the job. Though his excitement would fade as the reality of corporate America set in. Being a naturally stubborn man, my grandfather grew frustrated at all the rules and regulations that had to be so adamantly followed. Just as quickly as he applied, he quit, deciding to take matters into his own hands. He decided to open his own butcher shop.
In 1955 my grandfather rented out a small space in Pawtucket, Rhode Island and opened “Cote’s Meat Market.” The store was open 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday; Friday he was open till 9:00 p.m., and he was closed on Sundays and Mondays. But my grandfather was working in the shop hours before the doors officially opened. Alone, he would take out his array of carving and butchering knives, and with great ease and acute precision, swiftly sharpen each one along the sharpening steel held over his head, high in the air as if he we preparing for battle. The knives would swoosh and swish as he moved them through the air and cling and clang as they swiftly and just barely slid along the sharpening steel. He would then prepare the simple and often requested cuts to fill the meat cases for the eyes of the first gazing customers soon to enter the shop. Mornings were his busiest time, as customers always wanted the freshest cut of his certified USDA meat.
Early Monday mornings, well before 6:00 a.m., my grandfather would head to the wholesale market in downtown Pawtucket. Here he would enter a warehouse-sized refrigerator and hand select cow, lamb, and pig carcasses that would later be meticulously cut to order according to his clients wants and needs. Large, entire slabs of bacon and whole chickens were also bought, as they were staples and fast sellers at his shop. Once a week, venders would come into the shop and he would buy his luncheon meats and eggs. And a local family farm sold him his dairy. My grandfather also seasoned and strung his own sausage and had vats filled with homemade corned beef. He did all that he could to get the business going; working extra hours and coming up with new ways to set himself aside from the competition were always his main focus. Little by little, his hard work began to pay off. Along with the population of the small town, his clientele began to grow, and, fruitful as the business was, he was happily forced to move into a larger space a few towns over in Lincoln. . The extra space was also needed at home, as my mother was just born and in a few short years two boys would also be added. So he bought a real house, with a pool and everything, only a mile or two from the shop.
Cote’s Meat Market was the business my grandfather wanted to have since the first time he picked up the butchers knife back in high school. And, as expected from a man of the time, it provided for his family. It gave them a roof over their heads and plenty of food on the table each night. It was also a family business. It was a place where all of his children would one day work; be it cashiers like my mother and aunt or countermen like my two uncles. Most importantly, it allowed my grandfather to wake up in the morning and go to work happy.
My grandfather eventually closed his shop in the early 1980’s after over 25 years of steady, strong, and loyal business. Specialty shops all across the country, like my grandfathers, were overtaken by the growing monopoly of tenacious supermarket chains. I can only imagine the disappointment he must have felt the day he packed his knives away for the last time and closed the doors for good, not only on the shop, but on his dream.
Unfortunately he couldn’t abandon work altogether. Being too young to retire, he decided to take the real estate exam. He passed and swapped houses, continuing to support his wife and himself, his kids having all grown up and moved on with their own lives, until finally retiring some years later.
*
As we all crowd around the kitchen table to watch my mother dangerously fumble as she tries to sharpen the carving knife, my grandfather still remains on the couch in the living room. He sits, not watching or understanding, but blankly staring at the football game playing on the television. He sits alone, physically and mentally. A cold can of Budweiser, with it’s small beads of condensations slowly dripping closer and closer to the couch’s armrest, has long been replaced, as recommended by his doctor, with a bubbly can of Birch Beer. Luckily this transition from the real to the fake went smoothly, he never realized the swap. My grandmother, his wife of all these years, and his loyal, loving caretaker, doesn’t leave the house without a six-pack, knowing for sure her husband will ask for it. He appears not happy nor sad, mad nor glad, just indifferent, just there. He doesn’t know that the others have left the room. Soon his son will return to help him, as his balance and walking has become increasingly unstable, off the couch, up the two small steps out of the living room, into the dining room, and gently seat him at the head of the table like the man of the family he always was and always will be.
My grandfather is nearing 80, or so my mother estimates, and for the last 10 years he has slowly been fading away with the evil, menacing, and belittling disease of Alzheimer’s. There was a time not too long ago when he would see one of his grandkids and call him or her by their first name. Now, my grandmother reminds him whom he is hugging and saying “hello” to, again to be forgotten only a few minutes later. I say this selfishly as one of his grandchildren, but I can only imagine how his own children, my mother, aunt, and uncles, feel when their own father looks at them with a wide-eyed, narrow stare as if he has never seen them before; as if they were just strangers on the street; as if they were the television presenting the long forgotten, once love game of football. He was always a firm and disciplined man, as children my mother and her siblings would call him “Great Stone Face” because at the dinner table, as my uncles, in their innocent, pre-teen, Boy Scout years, would make jokes and prod each other endlessly, inducing everyone into laughter, even my grandmother, but he would not budge. The straight line of his lips wouldn’t crack even a millimeter. His mouth would only open when he raised a forkful of the fresh T-bone steak that was brought home from his shop for that night’s dinner.
His sternness faded once his children brought him grandchildren. Stuck in the aging, peel-away pages of the old photo albums stuffed into our foyer closet, are many images of my grandfather lovingly holding my sister or me when our skin was still baby soft. As a young boy, I’ll never forget the rides he took my sister, cousin, and I on in the trailer of his red tractor. He’d drive us around the block, along the nearby pond, and over the small hills in the neighbor’s lawn, for hours during a hot summer, Sunday afternoon when my aunts family and ours would meet at my grandparent’s house for a refreshing afternoon by the pool and an early evening cookout. As I grew older, playing was replaced with talking. Most of our conversations revolved around sports as we watched the Red Sox, Bruins, Patriots, or Celtics on holidays or in the small patio just off their house during the summer. He would always surprise me with an out of the blue question about my schooling and grades, emphasizing their importance. He cared then. And even though he can’t remember my name or who I am, let alone the primal activities that get a human being through each and every day, I know he cares now.
While my grandfather sits solemnly alone at his seat at the dining room table, my family gathers around my mother as she jaggedly saws the fresh, moist turkey into coarse slabs of meat and places them on a large serving platter. It is here that I think about past years when I witnessed my grandfather pull out the carving knife, the same one he used when he owned Cote’s Meat Market, from it’s thick, black leather holster, and diligently carve the turkey into smooth, straight cuts of luscious meat to be greedily devoured by my family. I saw first hand; I breathed the same air; I stood within feet of my grandfather, as he would, only once a year, reveal his mystifying carving skills that were mastered so many years ago. It was as if I was with him during his intimate, silent, early mornings when the sun hadn’t broken the horizon, deep in Cote’s Meat Market, as he sharpened his knives, made his cuts, and prepared his store for another days work.