Mickey Pierce Silverstein

My wonderful father never wrote to me in college. But he did communicate via apt Peanuts or New Yorker cartoons. Explanations were never needed; but some contained a few words he’d type using his office IBM. But I digress…this story is really about my grandmother…eye of newt…really, Dad!

We were a meat and potatoes family; pretty conventional in the 50s-60s, and all the women were great cooks. My grandmother’s chopped liver was phenomenal. Sensational! Famous! A college friend of mine tasted it on Spring break and begged me to set up a cooking lesson for the two of us. I’d become a vegetarian earlier that year but didn’t want to disappoint my friend so I set it up. Grandma was thrilled, of course!

We get to her Lakeview apartment and she has everything ready. Her meat grinder is attached to the countertop. In separate bowls are peeled hard-boiled eggs, peeled & quartered yellow onions, and what seemed to be a pile of mud and blood soaked remains of some poor animal that was found in the street and cut up. I didn’t faint. But I could neither look at nor touch that stuff regardless of my desire to please her and enjoy the hands-on (no pun intended) lesson.

I wedged myself between her refrigerator and the wall and didn’t come out, but the conversation and laughs flowed between us all. My grandmother pretended the lesson was just as she’d planned, and my friend, Cathy, had a great time. I came home and spilled it all to my folks and they laughed. Pure Dorothy.

Sometime later I found this cartoon in my mailbox. It reads: Is that all it says about eye of newt—add to taste?