The Candy Drawer

When I knew her, my Bubby always received company in the cluttered living room of her tiny apartment in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Although of course I have seen pictures since then, I only have the dimmest first-hand recollection of what she looked like when I was a small child - snowy white poofs of hair on either side of her face, thick glasses, sensible ugly lace-up shoes, and a stooped, compact frame always draped in loudly colored house dresses. Like her apartment, she was small, this little Jewish great-grandmother. Her wrinkled skin was soft when she kissed me.



I am sure that the apartment must have consisted of more than a living room, but that’s all we ever saw. My mother, grandmother and I would troop in. Hugs and kisses would be exchanged all around. “What a sheyner ponim!” she would exclaim, looking at me. What a pretty face. The grownups sat on the old faded sofa and chairs. Their conversation, in English punctuated with a little Yiddish, receded into the background in a soft drone like the teachers in a Snoopy cartoon. Here and there a few words about the her childhood in Russia would catch my attention, but inevitably I would tiptoe over to a big wooden breakfront that held collectible tchotchkas that Bubby had picked up over the years. There was very little of value on those shelves - I remember a jumbled collection of over-embelished wood, plastic, and ceramics like you would find in any second-hand store.

During a lull in the grownup conversation, Bubby would invite me to open a certain deep drawer in the dark wood end table next to her right elbow. The ritual was the same each time. I grew to expect it. I would slide the drawer open, and pull out two clear plastic bags. One bag was full of old-fashioned globs of soft pink bubble gum, wrapped in bright red, yellow, and blue. The other held the cheap Brach’s candies that you could buy in the big bins at the grocery store. Most were hard candies, with a few tootsie rolls or salt water taffies thrown in. For me, the choice would usually come down to a piece of gum or an preternaturally yellow butterscotch drop. Since being allowed to dive into Bubby’s candy drawer was the most exciting part of a visit to her apartment I would stretch out this decision as long as possible. Actually eating the candy was a lesser pleasure, since even at that young age I understood that these weren’t very good candies. They were the kind of hard candies that I would let sink to the bottom of my trick-or-treat basket while I gobbled the more alluring chocolate bars, until eventually my mother would dump them into the trash just to get rid of them. Still, choosing a piece of Bubby’s candy and then sucking on it for the rest of the visit was familiar and comforting.

I never knew, while my Bubby was alive, that she had once been a great cook. That her candy drawer was a lesser substitute for her impulse to feed everyone around her. When we visited Bubby’s little high-rise apartment, the kitchen was neat and clean and empty. I never saw her set foot in it. More than fifteen years after her death, my mother reminisced about Bubby’s delicate blintzes and hearty borschst. Her groaning Passover tables, which often fed 30 people or more, held made-from-scratch matzah ball soup and gefilte fish. For Shabbat dinner, she would bake giant babkas, a kind of brioche, oozing with sweet chocolate. Every day, she would bring my great-grandfather lunch at his work - soup plus a hot entree such as brisket. She fed five children and numerous grand-children, and managed to do all of this in a kosher kitchen.

As for me, I was born too late. By the time I was old enough to remember her, my Bubby had put down her mixing bowls and ladles and knives. But I still feel her standing behind me when I cook something that was probably in her repertoire. I think that’s the legacy of the candy drawer.