Memoir of the Sunday Brunch by Julia Pandl

Author:Julia Pandl [Pandl, Julia]
Language: eng, ita
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2012-02-08T13:00:00+00:00

George’s eightieth birthday at Jack Pandl’s. From left to right: Peggy, Chrissy, Johnny, Amy, George, Julie, Katie, Stevie, Jeremiah, and Jimmy.

PART II

What are we to make of Christ?

There is no question of what we can make of Him,

it is entirely a question of what

He intends to make of us.

You must accept or reject the story.

—C. S. Lewis

10

From There to Here

As I reached for a set of sheets on the top shelf of my linen closet, the hair on my arm brushed against the soft plastic end of a warped flyswatter. It hung on a crooked nail. I supposed I had put it there, though I had no recollection of doing so. I pulled it from its hook, rolled the bent wire handle around my fingers, and heard a voice in my memory saying, Can we leave that for the new people?

It was George. The two of us were standing on a musty-smelling bed of flattened rhubarb behind the garage in Oostburg, staring at an upside-down rusty bathtub. A jigsaw puzzle of yellow paint had chipped away from the tub’s underbelly, and black moss sprouted around the claw feet on one end. My mother loved that tub. The thing had made the move from Milwaukee to Cedar Grove and then to Oostburg. It was a little piece of Prospect Avenue, a classic leftover from a remodeling job of the boys’ bathroom. Each time the movers hauled it from the back of their van, before telling them to put it behind the garage, she talked of restoring it to its original beauty and putting it to use. I was pretty sure the new people wouldn’t need it, but certain also that lifting it would reveal something with beady eyes and razor-sharp teeth. I said, “Yeah, I’m thinking we can.”

That little exchange between my father and me happened a hundred times that day. He pointed to or picked up a thing, raised his eyebrows for approval, and I nodded. It began with the flyswatter, of course—because it was just wrong to pack that with bedsheets and bath towels—and it grew to include the dead geraniums in the plant room, broken rakes, rusty handsaws, a box of tangled fishing tackle, and a dusty stack of phone books in the workshop next to the garage.

It was a Saturday in October 1999, and my parents were moving from Oostburg back to Milwaukee. In the weeks, months, even years leading up to the move, I had watched my parents slide past their prime and into old age. I had come and gone, finished high school, attended college, worked at the restaurant and elsewhere, but the fact that they were growing older always compelled me to stay nearby. I guess I figured at some point they might need me, and a little part of me knew they wouldn’t be around forever.

My father had retired and unretired at least fifteen times. He sold the restaurant to my brother Jimmy, in 1987, my junior year in high school, and retired.

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