“The Artillery Ball,” by Norma Gardner

I came home from university in early November to attend the Artillery Ball, an annual black-tie event, hosted by the 49^th Field Regiment, of which my boyfriend Rob was not only a member, but a kilt-wearing one. He was a drummer in their pipe band and they were performing at the ball, a military event that honoured those who served.

Rob seemed comfortable in his skin, fit in with any crowd, and apart from the kilt-wearing thing, had a normal Canadian family – all things that didn’t describe me. My parents immigrated from Italy before I was born and my upbringing was coloured with traditional food and language and was tethered to customs from an ocean away. I was often an unwilling participant and resented the way my culture made me different.

With reverence in his voice, Rob described the formality of the event, ripe with military fanfare and Scottish regalia, mentioning he’d be in full highland dress. I didn’t know what any of this meant and was only focused on my dress, a beautiful ivory gown, with a full-length pleated skirt, adorned with a satin ribbon at the waist.

His full reveal came when he arrived at my parents’ house. While I was looking forward to seeing his shapely legs in a kilt, the star attraction was his bright red tunic, with silver braid, shiny buttons, and epaulettes.

Completing the look were his diced red and black hose, white spats buttoned at the side over black shoes, and a drummer’s plaid – a large fringed tartan shawl, tied at the waist under his tunic, and pinned under the left epaulette. I felt like a princess about to be swept away by my prince.

Even my Italian Catholic mother, who wasn’t thrilled I was dating a fair-haired Canadian Protestant boy, was quite taken with his ensemble and in her broken English, gifted him with, “You look very nice.” I guess dating a man who wore a skirt forgave the non-Catholic indiscretion.

Norma and Rob

We posed for the obligatory pictures and on our way to the ball, stopped in at the hotel gift shop where Rob’s mother worked. She wanted to see us in our finery and had to ensure her son’s plaid draped properly and fell in soft balloon formation at the back. 

After re-pinning it under the braided epaulette and doing a general inspection, she looked at me. “You’ll have to learn how to do this someday.”

I wondered if he was exaggerating the evening’s formality but the uniform and his mother’s serious attention to detail confirmed this was not like any other party. It was overwhelming for a shy, uncool girl, and every new piece of information made me more nervous about my fairytale evening. The voices in my head whispered that maybe my mother was right and a nice Italian boy was more my type.

Rob sensed my discomfort. “It’ll be fine. You’ll see. We’re sitting with the Whiteheads. They’re one of the most prominent families in town but are so down to earth that you’d never know it.” This did nothing to ease my sense of dread.

When we arrived at the armoury, it was like landing on an old movie set – tables clad in white, guests in uniform or donning their formal best. After filing through the receiving line and collecting our commemorative goblet, we were seated at a long table, across from William and Marg Whitehead, who were older than us and welcomed us with smiles.

William was a jovial man with a breathless lilt in his voice that sounded like perpetual laughter, and he teased Rob without mercy.

“So will you be going home with the same woman you came with this year?” he asked.

I pretended to laugh along and hoped nobody heard the butterflies battling for space in my stomach. Things took a turn though, when later in the evening, William declared, “She’s much better looking than the girl you brought last year.” I was starting to warm up to the Whiteheads.

The ceremonial part of the evening was about to begin and Rob left me to prepare for the entrance of the pipe band. He hadn’t mentioned they’d be preceded by a flaming boar’s head paraded through the hall on a pallet. I’d been to many lavish Italian weddings but an alcohol-soaked pig on fire was in a class of its own.

When the band marched in, I noticed Rob had donned the last part of his uniform, the crowning glory, a tall black feather bonnet with ostrich tails. Later, as we danced to the backdrop of old world tradition and the sway of tartan, I realized I’d fallen in love with the regalia, the Scottish culture, and my date.

I’d worried about our differences – he the cool and carefree one and me, introspective and studious, but that night revealed an alternate and humbling truth. Culture and heritage were at the core of our respective realities, even though I ran away from mine, resentful of the way it set me apart, and he ran toward his, immersing himself in tradition.

It was as if his passion to remain connected to his culture gave me permission to stop resisting a connection to mine. After all, if he could unapologetically wear a skirt and argyle knee-highs, while still managing to be cool and feel comfortable in his skin, then perhaps he was on to something.

As the months passed, I realized that his wasn’t the only culture he connected with. He became more Italian as time went on and my relatives started inviting him to family occasions even while I was away at school.

After trying to reach him all day on Easter, he called me back in the evening and said, “Oh sorry. I was at your uncle’s. I saw them when I was having lunch at your parents’ house and told them I’d never had lamb so they invited me to supper.”

At our wedding, we had bagpipes at the church and my dad’s homemade wine accompanied the traditional pasta dinner. To my mother’s chagrin, I included a long-forgotten Italian custom where Rob and I went to each table and scooped five almond wedding candies (it had to be an odd number) from a silver tray onto the napkin-lined hand of each guest.

One of the older relatives said, “I forgot about this custom. I haven’t seen it since I left Italy.”

We didn’t have a flaming boar’s head, but our Scottish-Italian wedding gave the Artillery Ball a run for the money, and the mix has carried us well for over forty years.

Norma Gardner retired from the corporate world a few years ago and enjoys spending time with family and friends, travelling, and expressing herself through her writing and sourdough recipes. Growing up in Northern Ontario, her family’s antics and her Italian upbringing supply the inspiration for her personal essays. She currently lives in Waterdown, Ontario.

Read more of Norma’s stories at her website here.

Read more short stories, essays, and reviews by your fellow writers here (and scroll down).

See Brian Henry's upcoming weekly writing classes, one-day workshops, and four-day retreats here.

 

“Egg Bread for Easter” by Norma Gardner

“No, you have to hide the egg!” my twenty-two-year-old daughter demanded.

I was covered with flour, had been up since dawn and my hands were starting to go numb. I didn’t need my twenty-two-year old acting like a two-year-old unless she was planning to help me with the bread scattered throughout my sticky kitchen.

“But you already know it’s in the bread,” I pleaded. “And Nana didn’t hide the egg when I was a kid.”

“I don’t care. This is the way you did it when we were kids and this is how Nana did it for us. It’s our tradition. You can’t mess with it.”

“Ok, sorry. Next year, I will hide the egg, that you already know is in there.”

“Thank you,” she huffed, as if I should have known better.

Perhaps I should have. When I was a kid through to when my mother passed, I took for granted that bread with a whole egg baked inside would appear at Easter. Unfortunately, I only took an interest in my mother’s old recipes after she passed and there wasn’t much to go on. That the recipes were written in scribbled Italian was the least of my problems. I called on her best friend, who often baked with my mom, to help me out. 

Hoping I didn’t sound like an amateur, I asked, “Why is there no flour listed in the ingredients? I know there’s flour in there – it’s bread! But how much flour?” 

“Oh, you’ll know,” she said.

I told her I would not know, so she sighed and gave me a starting point. “Start with eighteen cups of flour and work your way up. The dough will be sticky but be sure not to add too much flour.” 

This was helpful but terrifying. How sticky? And eighteen cups for starters – I knew my mother made several loaves but how many loaves were we talking about? I had more questions but I was used to tackling ambitious baking projects – I could do this. And perhaps my mother’s friend was right and I’d just know.

The first time I made Easter Bread I planned to keep track of how much flour I used. I vowed not to hand down recipes with “you’ll know” as an ingredient. I started with eighteen cups and stopped counting at thirty-two. I guess there’d be a “you’ll know” in my recipes, too.

Trying to channel my mother’s baking expertise while ignoring her voice in my ear and her hovering over my shoulder, only added to my anxiety. While wishing she was with me, I knew she’d criticize and correct my technique, I’d get defensive and we’d end up in a shouting match. It’s no mystery I never mastered her recipes while she was alive.

She used to start this bread in the late evening while she waited for my father to get home from work at 1:00 a.m. She juiced about a dozen oranges by hand, scalded the milk, added butter and sugar and then let the mixture cool to lukewarm before adding the juice, beaten eggs, softened yeast and pure anise extract.

Only after she mixed all the wet ingredients with care did she start to add flour. But it was about that time of night that I’d go to bed, knowing that I would awaken to the pungent smell of anise mixed with the sweet and yeasty aroma of freshly baked bread.

The next morning, she’d complain that even though she’d gone to bed as soon as my father got home, with the dough kneaded, covered with an old flannel blanket and readied for its five to six hour rise, she hadn’t slept.

She’d gotten up multiple times to check the dough, worried that it would rise so much that it overflowed even her biggest bowl. Sometimes her fears were justified and I’d find her in the kitchen, telling me she’d been up since before sunrise to ready the dough for its next rise.

With a decisive hand, she punched down the massive dough ball and then worked through the dough, slicing one piece off at a time, rolling it into a long thick rope, folding it in half and then braiding the two strands to make a long loaf.

She always placed an uncooked egg, still in its shell, in the small hollow at the top of the braid. This was the step that fuelled the egg controversy.

When my brother and I were growing up, the egg remained in plain sight with the dough rising up a bit to nest it in place. Once grandchildren arrived, my mother thought it would be fun and mysterious to hide the egg by putting a thin layer of dough over it, making it disappear under the pillowy bread.  

Hidden egg or not, there were always twenty or more loaves that rose again for another 90 minutes and occupied space on every available surface. The old oven fit three loaves at a time, so even after the baking began, the finish line was still far off.

Once out of the oven, the crowning glory was a boiled milk and sugar glaze that gave the loaves their trademark shine and sticky exterior. We’d barely wait for the loaves to cool before pulling pieces off with our hands to savor the the unique texture of the bread at the juncture of the twists where the dough was stringy and candy-like.

In the midst of the production, someone was always dispatched to deliver a still warm, wrapped loaf to a relative, friend or neighbour.

My mother passed twenty-six years ago, and I started making this bread shortly after, inviting family over to enjoy it hot out of the oven and sending bread home with them. 

I hid the egg as she had done for my children, until the year I decided to go back to the old tradition of an uncovered egg. After being reprimanded by my daughter, I reverted back to the way my children remembered, asking silent forgiveness for going against tradition.

As much as I felt pulled toward the custom of my childhood, my children only knew the hidden egg version. My mother had intended to create an aura of mystery with that hidden egg. And my kids loved it.

As if she knew I needed validation, my little cousin called me one day and asked how the egg got into the bread, to which I answered, “There’s an egg in there?”

Her mother told me later that her daughter’s eyes grew to twice their size. Yes, the mystery still worked. Who am I to mess with that?

***

Norma Gardner retired from the corporate world a few years ago and enjoys spending time with family and friends, travelling, and expressing herself through her writing and sourdough recipes. Growing up in Northern Ontario, her family’s antics and her Italian upbringing supply the inspiration for her personal essays. She currently lives in Waterdown, Ontario.

See our upcoming weekly writing classes, one-day workshops, and four-day writing retreats here.

To read other essays, reviews, poems, and short stories by your fellow writers, see here (and scroll down).

“Mrs. Walker Comes to Town” by Norma Gardner

 

Couples of long tenure often complete each other's sentences, as if there is an inverse relationship between years spent together and words required to get our point across. That being said, there was one morning about ten years ago when I guess I failed the “fill in the blanks test.”

It was a cold, icy winter morning in Northern Ontario, and on my way home from a business trip in Toronto, my flight landed late at our small local airport. My husband planned to pick me up and drive me straight to work for the rest of the afternoon but when I came into the terminal, he was nowhere to be found.

I thought perhaps he was running behind so I waited at the curbside until I realized it was about -20 C and decided to go back inside to stay warm. As I was already behind schedule, I started to become a bit anxious, but impatience gave way to worry after about 10 minutes of waiting with no husband in sight. He was nothing if not annoyingly punctual (and still is).

Meanwhile, my usual airport limo hires, many of whom knew my husband, were at the curb waiting for their next fares and very rightly pointed out that, had I booked with them as I usually did, I would be sitting in a warm vehicle, halfway into town by now, and in their opinion, riding in much better company.

I decided to try and call my husband in the hopes that he would actually have his cell phone with him and that he would have it turned on. When he answered and I asked where he was, there was a pause, some of what I thought was static and then I clearly heard him say "I'm on Airport Road,” and then we were cut off. Knowing he was close, I went back out to the curb to wait.

He pulled up a few minutes later and came out of the car in order to put my luggage into the back of our SUV, or so I assumed. Instead, with what looked like a lottery ticket in his hand, he tore past me in a hurry and said something about "Mrs. Walker." 

I didn’t know a Mrs. Walker, but before I could ask, he was inside the terminal building and I was left to take care of my own luggage. I took my seat on the front passenger side and waited, still puzzled, but hoping to be enlightened soon. I was mistaken. Out came my husband with a very elderly woman on his arm and another woman, perhaps the daughter, following behind, all of them in lively conversation.

My instincts told me that these people, who I vaguely recognized from my flight, were getting into our vehicle so I gave up my seat in the front, allowing the elderly woman to be more easily seated, and got into the back seat with her travel companion. They did not have to stow their own luggage.

No introductions were offered, but I had learned over the years that my husband wasn’t good at this type of thing so my expectations were low in this regard. After a few minutes of awkward small talk, mostly on my part, as the women seemed to think I knew what was going on and I didn't want to be rude or, worse yet, admit that I was the only uninformed one, we pulled into a restaurant near the airport.

My husband proceeded to unload the ladies and the luggage with thanks and good-byes all around. I took my rightful place in the front seat and waited for my husband to return, hoping that a very, very good explanation was forthcoming.

It turned out that, unbeknownst to my husband and due to spotty cell phone reception near the airport, I had missed the part of the conversation where he explained how he had pulled over to help a woman whose vehicle had slid into a ditch on an icy patch on Airport Road. She was on her way to the airport to pick up her friends, Mrs. Walker and her travel companion, who were arriving for a visit with friends and family.

My husband, frequent rescuer of damsels in distress, was the only one that stopped to help, assisting the distraught and thankfully uninjured driver out of her car and safely depositing her in a nearby restaurant to stay warm and call for a tow. She was quite concerned that she had no way to get word to Mrs. Walker, who would surely have landed by now.

Since my husband was already en-route to the airport, he offered to also pick up Mrs. Walker and companion, and drop them at the restaurant with their stranded friend, on our way into town. The driver had written her name and her friends' names on the first slip of paper she could put her hands on, an old lottery ticket selection slip. This was, I suppose, meant to serve as evidence to her friends, that my husband could be trusted and that he was not a stalker of air travelers. 

This was one instance when I didn't successfully complete my husband's sentence. (In my defence, it wasn’t just one sentence!). Instead, I had to fall back on trust in the unspoken words, luckily also a privilege of the long time married.

***

Norma Gardner retired from the corporate world a few years ago. Her longtime side gig as a seamstress, is now mostly limited to taking requests for superhero capes and the like from her grandchildren. She is content to spend time with family and friends, travel, and practice perfecting her sourdough recipes and her writing. 

“Mrs. Walker Comes to Town” was first published in White Wall Review. 

 See Brian Henry’s upcoming weekly writing classes, one-day workshops, and weekend retreats here.

Santa's Great Escape by Norma Gardner

The tree twinkles, the mantel sits proudly adorned, the cookies tease our tastebuds, and the brightly wrapped gifts fill us with anticipation. Exit to the other side of the doorknob for an entirely different experience. Every year, my husband painstakingly and persistently attempts to make the outside of the house look as festive as the inside, primarily to rebut our daughter's critical assessment that “our house is boring.”

Our neighbours hang garland that surprisingly stays in place. Their inflatable Santas, elves, reindeer and all manner of characters, obediently stay put on their front lawns. By some freak of nature, their beautiful urn planters lit with lush greenery, stand upright and at attention on either side of their garage doors, through fierce Northern Ontario winds.

While we attempt all of the above and more, our decorations seem to have a rebellious streak and an inherent tendency to fall off, tip over and literally attempt to escape when they think we aren't watching. And while our neighbours enjoy the same snowfall accumulation as we do in December, their lawn ornaments don't get swallowed up into the white abyss. Ours however, seem to disappear, only to be seen again after the spring thaw.

One fall, thinking we were quite clever, we removed the dead annuals from our black plastic urn planters but left the earth so that we could sink little potted self-lit trees into them at Christmas. Our hope was that the weight of the earth would keep the urns in place, after learning the previous year, that small plastic pots containing little bargain trees were too easy a target for the north winds or likely any winds.

Our hopes were dashed when we came home one night, only to find the plastic urns tipped over and unearthed. Even tying the trees themselves to the drain pipe didn't work. This only resulted in the tree still connected to the pipe and dangling in mid-air while the plastic urn rolled down the driveway, a trail of mud in its wake.

Then there were the Santa episodes. My husband purchased a three-foot plastic light up Santa, at a much-discounted price. He was an odd orange colour but was a great bargain and had one hand raised in welcome, which we thought would look very inviting by our front door. We were correct, except that every time the wind blew him over, which was almost a daily occurrence, the light bulb broke.

Many light bulbs later, we decided it would be best to securely tie him to the trunk of the maple tree in our front yard. As we normally had very white Christmases, the success of this strategy was short lived. My very patient and persistent husband dug Santa out after every snowfall before Christmas, after which time we all stopped caring and watched as he got swallowed up bit by bit by the snow until his little mitten clad hand was waving no more. Santa, that is, not my husband.

The following winter we retired plastic Santa and graduated to inflatable Santa. We had high hopes for this Santa. We were convinced that he could single-handedly elevate our house from boring to at least acceptable, in our daughter’s eyes. Apparently, all we had to do was place him on the lawn, hook him up to the Christmas lights, turn on the outdoor lights and lo and behold, instant Santa.

My husband even purchased a red floodlight to shine on our new addition, making Santa the star attraction in our simple display. We watched with great anticipation from the front window as, with the mere flick of a switch, Santa unfolded himself and stood at attention. This excitement quickly turned to dismay when we looked out one night to see Santa tilted to one side, at about a 45-degree angle from the ground. 

He looked as if he was either half asleep or fully intoxicated. Once again, my very patient husband ventured into the snow laden front yard to attempt a course correction. No amount of repositioning, packing snow around Santa’s feet, readjusting ground stakes or batting him back and forth in the head, a last resort after nights of many non-violent attempts, seemed to help. I worried that our neighbours with young children might report us.

Our next and final attempt was to tie Santa by his neck to the drain pipe beside the garage door. We optimistically thought that anchoring him close to the side of the house would offer protection from the winds. We left him unsupervised one night and returned home to find him still inflated, still somewhat tied to the drain pipe, but attempting to escape down the side of the house. He was actually showing us his back. This was probably payback for the head slapping incident.

Both Santas are now retired, the little pre lit trees are no more and the plastic urns are content to do summer duty, spending their winters in our storage shed where they steer completely free of trouble. The only outdoor decorations consist of a simple string of lights, a lovely wreath that is well secured to the door with a proper wreath hanger, and some bright red shiny shatterproof, weatherproof ornaments hanging from the bare branches of our maple tree.

The floodlight remains and shines onto an undecorated front lawn as a gentle reminder of our futile attempts, lest we get any grand ideas. The lack of entertainment is likely disappointing for our neighbours, I'm sure our friends miss the stories of our defiant decorations, and our daughter reminds us that her assessment is correct, but sometimes less is better, and boring is ok.

***

Norma Gardner retired from the corporate world a few years ago. Her longtime side gig as a seamstress,  is now mostly limited to taking requests for superhero capes and the like, from her grandchildren. She is content to spend time with family and friends, travel and practice perfecting her sourdough recipes and her writing. 

See Brian Henry’s upcoming weekly writing classes, one-day workshops, and weekend retreats here.