The First Sunday

(As per my vow to cook for others in my house every Sunday.)

It wasn't until all the food was eaten and most of the guests were gone that the moment happened.
My mom's birthday dinner went off fine. The Lasagna I made was nice and saucy, the layer of grilled eggplant turned out to be a good idea. The Drunken goat cheese was better than the uber-thick mozzarella I've used in the past. There were kids playing, the wine was all fine, (even though it gave me a headache) it was good to see my brother very happy with his new girlfriend.
My mom was pleased and kept telling me "I can't believe you did this, you shouldn't have done this!"
It was over fast as my mom and her man split to see a concert, then my brother left to get his daughter to his ex wife. Only Jennifer hung around with her grand daughter Camille. Camille and my daughter Faye holed themselves up in our bedroom doing flips off the bed and watching Spongebob. Dashiell, who's six, stayed out in the living room, listening.
It isn't often he just hangs around listening and talking to adults when there are kids around.
But Jennifer has a hypnotic voice. She's a big Bubby. A hundred years ago she'd have been in a shtetl with a black headscarf on and a gaggle of little kids around her, or maybe a Yentl, telling them amazing stories of Dybbuks, Golems, and Rabbis.
Today she is a retired first grade teacher, a big huggable slow moving woman with a bad hip and a beautiful shock of short white hair. She talked and talked as she does, long stories about mundane things made interesting by her animated teacher's voice. Dash holed up in the easy chair and sat transfixed for an hour, occasionally joining in, in his stilted but eager six year old talk, telling a little story to join in.
As I kept looking over at him it hit me, that he was becoming familiar with a sound that was such a part of my childhood. The sound of someone's voice, so distinctive, like a thumbprint, much more vital that than their picture, or what others can say about them. In twenty or thirty years I can talk about my childhood, how Jennifer and my mom ruthlessly, ceaselessly tried to match me up with Jennifer's daughter Missy, and Dash won't just look at me dumbly becasue he spent every day with just his nuclear family or watching TV when all the grownups talked.
The food seems pretty irrelevant sometimes, except that it can be the glue that keeps us together.