9. Hillbilly Lasagna

The secret to my famous Lasagna is in the sauce and I learned about making sauce from Phil.  Until I met Phil, I thought that spaghetti sauce was made with cans – cans of tomatoes, cans of mushrooms and cans of parmesan cheese.  Phil taught me that a sauce is only as good as the ingredients.  He told me to always use fresh ingredients and to pay special attention to each one of them.  Then the sauce would make itself.  I met Phil because of Betty.  Until I met Betty, I thought family was just folks who were related by blood.  Betty taught me a whole other meaning.

Betty was my first mother-in-law and she was such a jewel that I divorced the husband but kept her.  She was a four foot eleven, red headed firecracker from Kentucky.  She had one sign in her kitchen that said, “I used to have ten theories on raising children.  Now I have ten children and no theories.”  She had another sign that said, “Show me a woman with a clean kitchen and I’ll show you a neurotic woman.” Her kitchen was spotless.  I suppose she probably was a bit neurotic.

Betty was the single mother of five boys and one girl and she was in perpetual motion. Shortly after I met her we all took a trip to Kentucky to visit her parents.  She drove all night while the rest of us slept.  Then as the sun came up she stopped at a rest area.  In a flash she had the cast iron skillet on the BBQ pit with bacon simmering and a pot of coffee perking up a storm.  At the same time she was waking up five kids.   Within an hour she had us all dressed, fed, the dishes cleaned and put away, teeth and hair brushed and back on the road. She had the discipline of a drill instructor but she always had the heart of a mother.  No matter how hectic or crazy life got, she knew what was going on with each one of her kids.  She even kept tabs on us strays. She knew which one didn’t turn in a book report, didn’t do their chores, was coming down with a cold, was feeling lonely, keeping secrets or needed some space. They were her vocation, her career, the focus of her life. 

Late at night, after the kids were sleeping and all the chores were done, you could see her staring out at the night sky. A houseful of kids did not stop her from being lonely.  It wasn’t long after I met her that she met Phil and the two of them just clicked.  On the surface, they were as different as two people can be and yet they completed each other, made each other whole.  With Betty, Phil came alive and Phil made Betty feel safe enough to relax and laugh.      

Phil was an easy going, big hearted Italian and the best man I ever knew.  He was decent and honest and everyone who met him was a better person for having known him.  He came over on the boat from Italy when he was only nine and married his high school sweetheart.  When she became ill he cared for her and their children balancing his days between work at the factory, caring for the children and visits to the nursing home. Eventually loneliness began to gnaw at him like a hunger.  He tried to fill the emptiness at the local bar, becoming one of those sad figures sitting alone in the shadows night after night.

That’s where Betty first met Phil.  Betty and her best friend Darlene had just been to visit Darlene’s husband in the hospital.  The girls decided to stop for a drink before heading home. Betty was full of nervous energy from being cooped up too long at the hospital. At heart she was a country girl and didn’t like being confined.  She needed to stretch her legs.  They ordered a couple of beers and walked over to a booth.  Betty wanted to play some music and was digging around for quarters when she noticed Phil. He was sitting alone at the end of the bar staring into a drink. Phil looked up at this noisy women digging for change and handed her a stack of quarters off the bar. Just like in the movies, he looked up and their eyes met.  They both knew immediately.  They were soul mates and they belonged together. Separately they were both wonderful people but together they were something more. Their joy spilled over onto every life they touched. 

They rented a big white farmhouse out in the country and moved in with both sets of children, step children, adopted children and me. I loved that old house and lived with them while Carlton, my husband was in boot camp. Other people came and stayed for awhile too.  Carlton’s friends, home on leave or home from college would stop in.  Phil’s Italian relatives and Betty’s southern kin would all come calling.  It was a house filled with love and laughter.

Whenever there was a problem, Phil would take you out to the garage to work on the car.  That was where he did his best tinkering.  But he wasn’t working on a car engine, he was teaching life lessons.  He was old school – all about family responsibility, integrity and honor.  Betty ruled the kitchen.  It was always busy with something warming on the back burner and she was always quick to set another place at the table.  At night she would slip away to a corner of the living room with a comfy chair and a good reading lamp.  Her secret love was a good novel and a bit of peace and quiet.  Phil was the crossword king and he did it in ink. 

I stayed with Betty and Phil while I waited for Carlton, Betty’s oldest son to come home on leave.  But he never came home. After Basic he went to San Diego and he stayed away for two years. I went to San Diego once to visit him but he was too busy to see me and I came home. I knew then that too much had changed.  He was a long haired hippy when I married him but he had become a Marine, a jarhead, a grunt.  As time passed our worlds grew father and farther apart. We mirrored what was happening in the country.  It was a time great challenges and many families had been torn apart but not at Betty and Phil’s house. When we sat down to dinner, we were family.  We were not enemies in some culture war.  Whether we wore Marine Corps Dress blues or tie dyed bellbottoms we were family.  We worried about deployment not because of some ideological opposition to the war but because it put someone we loved in danger.  I wanted him to come home to see that we were still alike, still related.  But he never did.

When I found out that my husband’s roommate “Sam” was really Samantha, we divorced.  But Betty and Phil’s house was still like a second home to me.  It was a place of refuge, a sanctuary.  It was the place for the Thanksgiving Dinner or the Christmas Feast.  In their home I always knew that I would be welcomed and loved.  Whatever war was being waged elsewhere, in this place, we were family first.

It was that house that I ran to when I lost my first child.  When my thoughts were so painful I had to become numb to survive.  I called from a pay phone barely able to speak and within an hour Betty and Phil were loading me into their car.  They parked me in the window seat of the dining room.  I was catatonic, like a potted plant in the window.  I vaguely remember that time.  It felt like I was underwater.  I could see vague outlines of the people around me but their words were garbled.  Mostly I remember feeling safe.  I knew that Betty and Phil would protect me while I found a way to heal.   I’m not sure how long I stayed there but gradually the noises crept in and I opened up. I blossomed there in that window seat, safe in the care of Betty and Phil. 

Later when my daughter (named Elizabeth for Betty) was born, it was Betty who taught me how to be a Mom.  I was so terrified of losing another child that I was almost afraid to touch her.  Betty walked in and scooped her up from her cradle pulled off all the blankets and danced her around the living room.  She giggled and cooed at Betty.  Then Phil charmed her by singing in Italian and she smiled just for him.  The love that Betty and Phil shared healed the wounds of those they loved. 

It was Phil who taught me how to make his spaghetti sauce.  He taught me to cover the bottom of the cast iron skillet with olive oil, mince the fresh garlic and sauté it first and then add the onions and mushrooms. He showed me how to sauté them just till they were transparent. He taught me about fresh tomatoes, Italian sausage and oregano.  But the real secret to Phil’s famous spaghetti sauce is a dash of red vinegar.  I think the secret to their happy home was a dash of red headed woman.  That redheaded woman served corn bread, cole slaw, three bean salad or whatever was handy along with Lasagna, just to make enough to feed one more.  She made sure that no one ever left her table hungry and she never hesitated to set another plate for dinner.

Years later I would find that as I boarded the plane, Betty was trying to find me to tell me that Phil had died. She needed me then but I was gone. And now she’s gone.   I never got to say goodbye to either one of them.  Never really told them how much they meant to me, how much I loved them.  But I think they know, I could never have survived this life without the two of you.

You never see the important ones coming.  You don’t even realize it when they’re standing right in front of you.  It takes half a lifetime and a continent before you understand what they did.  I can’t imagine my life without Betty and Phil.   Time and again they rescued me from the edge and without speaking a word gave comfort to a troubled child.