My earliest memory of my father involves hamburgers and French fries. I was three years old (my brother was two and my sister four) the first time my father took us to McDonald’s for dinner.  In 1964, long before Egg McMuffins and Chicken McNuggets were cultural icons, McDonald’s was a walk-up window that offered just fast, nickel hamburgers, and hot french fries. The sign in front boasting the number of hamburgers sold was still in the thousands, and the grand golden arches began at the front of the tiny box building, and stretched straight over top of it. We always waited in the car while my father ordered.  Soon, he appeared with bags of burgers.  

He was a handsome young man: tall at 6’2”, strong and suntanned, with shiny, tar black hair, and big brown eyes, framed by long, dark lashes. And although my father says that he was "broke as a convict" back then, he possessed a personality quirk that served him always: he carried himself with a fierce and impenetrable air of authority. And on our harmless journeys to McDonald’s, he was certainly powerful; he decided when we’d go, drove us there, made all the choices, paid for everything, and doled it out. To me, he was everything, a God.

When I think back on my life with my father, food is a relentlessly recurring theme. Food has always been more important to my father than it is to most people. When he was a busy twenty-something with a demanding job and a wife and three young children, he made time to analyze cookbooks and wine lists and food articles that appeared in the old Washington Star newspaper. Ours was the only house in our neighborhood that had a wine cellar, built in the darkest, coolest corner of our basement.

My father indulged in bagels, cappuccino, croissants, and gourmet chocolates long before they became food fads. He didn’t simply enjoy the foods he believed were good; he also detested foods he considered inferior, or poorly prepared.  With my father, food not only enriched all pleasurable occasions and experiences, it ran the show. According to him, special occasions called for special foods, and the annual TV presentations of "The Wizard of Oz," and "Cinderella," were special enough. As the wicked witch cackled, he grilled rich, pimiento cheese sandwiches. During a commercial, he fixed Jiffy-pop popcorn; we watched my father magically transform what appeared to be a drab cooking utensil into a flashy silver ball. While Cinderella waltzed with her prince, we toasted marshmallows on shish kebab skewers in our living room fireplace, while my father slow heated a mix of whole milk and Hershey’s syrup, for hot chocolate. It was what he wanted to fix, when he wanted to fix it; we never questioned that.   

Every autumn Sunday, my father descended to our basement rec room to watch football on T.V. Sitting in his great, olive-green Naugahyde reclining chair, he ate sardines packed in mustard sauce, right out of the can. The fishy smell ran my brother and sister out of the room. Not me. Feeling wholly secure, I sat on my father’s lap, sharing his treat. My secret was that I really didn’t like the oily little fish; they were a ticket to my father’s attention.    

"I’d rather get my ass kicked," was my father’s opinion of food shopping, when I was little. Though his goal was to become a millionaire before he turned 30 (quite a dream for an Ohio farm boy), he was a finish foreman for an apartment builder then, still getting dirty on the job. Dog-tired after work, shopping at the rattletrap A & P with his wife and three chattering, little kids was irritating. He rushed us through the store, impulsively buying sale items in bulk. Five bottles of ketchup, for instance. And ten cans of Ann Page condensed chicken noodle soup, four boxes of Kix cereal, and three economy-sized jars of grape jelly, for good measure. He would’ve bought a whole side of beef if it would fit in our freezer, just to avoid going food shopping again anytime soon.

The contents of the recklessly purchased cans of condensed soup never passed my father’s lips. For our weekend dinners, my father warmed the soup and made peanut butter sandwiches (hungry, too, he ate spoon after spoon of peanut butter, right out of the jar) for us kids, and my mother put us to bed.  Only then did my parents eat their adult dinners, which my father learned to cook with help from my mother: lobster tail, broiled strip steak, or jumbo shrimp sautéed in lemon-butter, complemented by baked potatoes with chives and sour cream, fresh steamed asparagus, and a salad, tossed with romaine lettuce, onions, homemade croutons, ripe tomatoes, bits of real bacon, and a scant shake of Roquefort dressing.  

And always, a bottle of red wine or chilled chardonnay. Though she's been dead 25 years, my father still says, "Your mother was a very good cook." Quite a compliment, coming from him. When we kids were especially good, or lucky, or my father had a sweet tooth, we went out for ice cream cones.  My father’s favorite was frozen custard, laced with egg yolks and real vanilla. We piled into his red, Pontiac convertible, and rode downtown to the frozen custard place--an enchanting, concrete sandcastle that was embedded, to remind you of ice, with pieces of broken mirror. We waited outside for my father. When he returned, especially on hot days, the ice cream would be dripping. To fix that, he’d lick up just about half of my ice cream.          

"Daddy, let me have it," I’d plead, "please."  

"All you’re going to do is make a big mess," he’d say, lapping away.  

I didn’t challenge him further; I simply watched him intently, praying there would be something left for me. Ice cream was a treat that my father used as a reward, too. Since I struggled with my math lessons, my father promised me a banana split when I memorized my times tables. Through painstaking, numerous repetitions, some inborn determination, and memory of my father’s promise, I learned them. One bright Saturday afternoon, my father took me to the lunch counter at a nearby drug store, and ordered two banana splits. I don’t remember the ice cream; I simply recall being thrilled to be out, alone, with my father. My memory of multiplication facts proved short lived--since that time and to this day I can’t always remember them.   

Not so common in the 1960s, my parents separated (my mother told us that they just couldn’t get along), and later divorced. I was nine, and the loss of daily contact with my father nearly shattered my lively spirit. I was at first shocked, and then very sad; I missed him terribly. Our relationship, like almost everything familiar to me at the time, changed. I only saw my father a few times each month, usually for dinners out in fancy restaurants. Also around that time, he was promoted to Vice President of Construction, and became a partner of the building firm. Though a few years behind schedule, he met his goal to become a millionaire, and was now strictly a suit and tie man. To this day, his hard work during those years remains visible; the Washington , D.C. area is dotted with shopping centers, high-rise apartment buildings, office complexes, and warehouses that my father brought to life.    

Immersed in his work, my father never arrived for our visits on time. His lateness infuriated my siblings, and while they grumbled, I waited patiently. I stood outside, sometimes for more than an interminable hour, watching for his huge, gold Cadillac to round the corner down the street from our house. Finally, he would roar into our driveway, smiling, his tie loosened at the collar. I was happy to see him and didn’t want anything to spoil our time together.  Despite my good humor, I noticed that my father often seemed distracted, as if there were other places he’d rather be. I tried awfully hard to ignore that. Because my parents divorced, I ate more dinners in restaurants than any other kid I knew.  Strangely enough, my father’s fatherly advice typically pertained to food and restaurants:   

"You don’t ever order fried chicken in an Italian restaurant, and you don’t order spaghetti at a chicken place." 

"Steak cooked well done is okay if you want to eat shoe leather—-steak should never be cooked more than medium rare." 

"Take that hat off," he said to my brother. "You never wear hats in a restaurant." Years later, he said the same thing to my son.   

During our restaurant dinners, my father taught us proper table manners.  We learned which glass was for wine, and which was for water.  The salad fork, we learned, was the smaller of the two, located on the left. We learned to break our bread in threes, and to cut one bite of steak at a time. I watched my father test-taste wine from bottles opened by waiters in many restaurants. Most times, he gave a nod of approval, but when the wine wasn’t good, he screwed up his face, and the waiter hurried off to fetch another. As always, he knew what he was doing.   

As a newly single man, living in an apartment at the Watergate, my father became more weight conscious.  "You can’t be too skinny or too rich," he said. Being skinny was an unlikely desire for a man who was so passionate about food, but he was never fat. All three of his children, however, leaned toward heavy. "Not so much salad dressing,Q or "That’s too much butter," he’d say. Sometimes, his words hurt like a pinch: "You need that like you need a hole in your head." Minutes later, contradicting his admonitions, he’d order Baked Alaska for us all. I would have given up all the flaming ice cream and fancy dinners out to have my father living at home with us again. It wasn’t to happen, but I coveted this wish for years.  

To me, my father was always handsome, but it wasn’t until I was an adolescent that I realized that everyone thought so. My 8th grade math teacher, upon reading my surname, asked me if I was kin to my father. When I answered affirmatively, she smiled, and told me that he was her "friend."  My father told me the truth: he had dated her a few times the year before. Now and then, my teacher asked me how he was doing, and I could hear desperation in her voice. While her question seemed to tickle my classmates, it made me uncomfortable--my math teacher wasn’t supposed to be pressed about my father.  But, I figured, she’d probably had a few dinners out with him, and I knew what that was like. 

And my girlfriends had crushes on my father, too.  "Your dad is so gorgeous," they said.  He wasn’t just profoundly good looking, though; my father was gifted with an intangible quality that few men over 30 ever possess: he was cool. An athlete since the day he was born, he played a mean tennis game, and spent many winter weekends skiing in Aspen-- quite trendy pastimes in the 1970s.  My father wore jeans and Gucci loafers (sockless, of course), and a Rolex watch and drove a Mercedes-Benz two-seater like he was supposed to. He listened to top-40 music and had rhythm and could dance all night long.  My girlfriends called him by his first name, Jack. "How’s Jack?" they’d ask, as if they knew him.  I don’t know why; they’d never even shared a snack with him.   

When I was 15, my father remarried. With his new wife, he designed and built a summer home on the Delaware shore, in Rehoboth Beach. For the first time in years, we ate together in a homey atmosphere, and it was there that my father taught me never to press on hamburgers cooking on the grill, because they get dry. And he showed me that there are no redder, juicier tomatoes to be found than those grown in the salty, summer earth of the Eastern shore, and he introduced me to sweet-as-candy beach cantaloupe, a delicious morning treat we ate outside, enveloped in the fresh Atlantic Ocean breeze. I learned to store ground coffee in the freezer to keep it fresh and to put rice kernels in my saltshakers, so that the salt would always flow freely.  

My father still loved vanilla frozen custard, which we ate as we walked on the boardwalk in the cool of evening. The man who detested grocery shopping not so many years before shopped for food every morning at the beach. "I want fresh stuff," my father would say. Sometimes, I joined him for the silent, short ride. At the store, I observed his purchases. My father bought the blue-ribbon wares of local farms:  double-yolked brown eggs and sweet, white butter, and fresh bacon wrapped in heavy, manila paper.  And always, juice from oranges squeezed while we were sleeping. For dinner, he’d buy two-inch thick strip steaks to marinate and grill and baby peas, still nestled in the pod, to cook with a little bacon grease and some sweet onions. Or maybe a dozen ears of silver queen corn, which he’d soak in ice water and roast, still in the husk, in the oven. His final purchase, always: The Washington Post. "This fog will burn off," he’d say on our ride back from the store. "It will be sunny by noon time." And it was.   

On Memorial Day in my 19th year, I was brutally injured in a car accident. The car I was riding in was hit head-on by a car commandeered by a terribly drunk man, who was driving 90 miles per hour down the wrong side of the road. Police on the scene said that people pulled from such twisted, bloody wreckage were usually dead. Though I have no memory of it, I told the ’s General Hospital’s shock trauma team to call my father, at his beach house. He was having dinner at the Adriatico, a quaint, Italian restaurant, close to the water. As usual, he was among friends, celebrating life with a bottle of wine, and to this day he remembers what he was eating: lightly breaded veal chops, served with spaghetti dressed in traditional red sauce. Upon hearing that my condition was critical and unstable, he put his fork down, got in his car, and drove 150 miles to my bedside. 

My left ankle was crushed to powder, my right foot fractured in 13 places, and my right leg in two. My right arm was broken so badly that part of my bone poked through the skin, like a baby’s tooth through the gum. My scalp was cut, jagged and gaping, and one of my lungs had collapsed. My father ordered me moved to the George Washington University Hospital, not far from his Georgetown home, and engaged a respected orthopedic surgeon to put me back together. I spent the whole summer in the hospital, and my father visited me almost every day. He brought me everything I asked for, even cigarettes, though he hated that I smoked. Just as surprising was that he brought foods that he would normally label as "slop," just because that’s what I wanted: canned purple and red fruit punch and canned cheese that squirts from a plastic tip, with snack crackers, Filet-o-fish sandwiches from McDonald’s, two liter bottles of root beer, and M & M’s.  For once, he didn’t offer his editorial food opinion. It was two years before I walked again.  

In the five years that followed, I was married, moved, had two sons, and divorced. During those busy, crazy years, my dinner often consisted of two slices of American cheese slapped between two slices of white bread. I rarely joined my father for dinner then. "You’re up to your ears in alligators," he said, which was an understatement.           

Once past the barbaric baby stage, my sons learned all about dinner out with their grandfather, though he never once took them to McDonald’s.  "Your wine list is all wrong," my father said abruptly, and bluntly, to a waiter in one posh restaurant, which sent my kids into fits of giggles. "Well, it’s true," my father said, his eyes wide in surprise at their laughter. At another dinner out, my younger son was astonished when my father said to his wife, "You may as well take those chicken fingers and apply them directly to your ass." Though my son laughs about this still, it is a reminder to me that some things don’t change. My father is to my children as he was to me: an undeniably powerful man. My sons are extremely well behaved when they are with their grandfather; they always practice fine table manners and thank him for everything, without being reminded.     

Now a robust 66, my father is still into food. Not long ago, he called me to see if I knew where he could buy local asparagus. Only local asparagus, mind you.  Don’t ask me why--that’s just my father. When I recently asked him what he knew about DC’s famous fish market, he said, "That’s just a tourist trap, for God’s sake. Don’t you know that the best place to buy fresh seafood in DC is at Cannon’s in Georgetown ?" I didn’t know that, and wasn’t surprised that he did. He still admonishes any family member who bristles at the sight of rare steak, and he still eats peanut butter right out of the jar, with a spoon. For a family cookbook compiled in honor of his mother’s 85th birthday in 2001, my father submitted a simple recipe for one of his all-time favorite foods: Fried Green Tomatoes. His notation following his recipe:  ENJOY.

Author's Biography

I am the 41-year-old single parent of two teenage boys. For the past 14 years, I have been a property manager of subsidized housing in D.C.'s toughest areas.  

I am also a student of the Johns Hopkins University's graduate nonfiction writing program. The Washington Post published four of my essays in 2001.  

E-mail Jill at jillgmatthews@aol.com

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