Someone is missing from the Table

June 15, 2020

At any time a smell can take me to another place. Especially now, during the stay-at-home order in Colorado, the smell of almost burnt butter in a cast iron pan brings me back to my childhood home in Connecticut, to Sunday evenings when my father was making crêpes.

I’d find him in our patchwork kitchen with a sunny yellow apron tied tightly over his belly. By this point the smoke alarm might already be going off. After whisking a few eggs and some milk in a stainless steel mixing bowl, he’d slowly add this mixture to a bowl with flour and salt. I never once saw him measure any ingredients. He could tell if the proportions were off by the consistency of the batter. He would add more flour with the sweep of his hand.

This is what I remember: Melt butter in a medium hot pan. Pour the batter with a ladle into the pan and swirl it around to cover the surface. Gently work a spatula over the crêpe to fill in the holes. Watch the edges slightly brown, and it’s ready to flip. Listen for the sound the crêpe makes when you press it with the spatula—the far-off buzz of bees. It is almost ready.

One of the last times my father was well enough to make crêpes, I had said no. I had just come home from walking around the lake and didn’t want to feel the heaviness of the crepes with warmed maple syrup. I’ll never forget the look on his face.

2020. That was what he always told us.

My father André Poitras was born in 1920 in Chicoutimi, Quebec, Canada, and was convinced that he’d live to be one hundred years old. With a mischievous smile, he regularly made his “2020” pronouncement. He didn’t make it, but he would have been heartbroken by the suffering of this time.

André’s story was one marked by separation. When he was six weeks old, his twenty-five year old mother, Yvonne, carried him across the border with one of his sisters into the United States, heading to Fall River, Massachusetts, to join other family members. A laborer on the Canadian railroad, his father stayed behind.

Some years later, when his mother was suffering from tuberculosis, she dropped him and one of his brothers off at the St. Vincent’s Orphans Home until she was well enough to care for them. Then, in the depths of the Depression, his mother sent the twelve-year-old to a seminary run by the Brothers of Christian Instruction in Alfred, Maine.

In 1944, while five of his brothers were fighting in WWII, he boarded Le Ville d’Amiens at Pier 90 in New York to take a three-month journey to Uganda to serve in a different way and begin his work as a missionary. (That same pier is now the temporary home of the USNS Comfort.)

In the sixties, he returned to the states to marry and start a family. He was borrowed from another place, another time. With one foot in the Northern Hemisphere and one in the Southern, he scattered Swahili words into conversation and told stories of the Mountains of the Moon. But it was in the French language that he found communion: with his mother and his lineage.

Now, one month before what would have been my father’s 100th birthday, this is how I say yes. I prepare the crêpe batter and melt unsalted butter in a cast iron pan. As I swirl the batter in the pan, I invite decades-old grief to pour forth. As I listen for that unmistakable sound, I tap into the collective grief of the world: the loss, the broken heartedness, and the painful knowing that so many are missing from the table.

My son, Ander, is perched in front of his laptop with a few more days left of high school, unsure of how the future will unfold. “This is how you meet your Pépère,” I say, passing a plate of folded crêpes to him. He reaches out to accept it, and, in this moment, the fabric is mended.

Perhaps this is how we move through these days of separation. We plunge into the depths of memory and acknowledge the losses. We look closely at all the ways that we may have abandoned each other.

With so many people unsure of where their next meal will come from, we must help however we can. In the ritual of preparing food and eating together, we are making a space to witness and transform the world’s grief. We are making a space to heal.

Danielle Poitras is a multimedia storyteller who lives in Longmont, Colorado.