Dessert First

Crystal Mill near Marble, Colorado as a summer storm looms

My family enjoys sharing a story about my grandmother Stella ordering dessert first in restaurants. I am sure that she did it, albeit not regularly, and we all certainly remember the point she was making.

My paternal grandmother, she was the daughter of poor, Russian Jewish immigrants; she raised her family in a multigenerational house in New York surrounded by families with similar stories; she sent both her children to elite colleges and then medical school; and, as we all take pains to point out, she smoked, drank and gambled for the entire length of her life until, in a backhanded blessing, she died quickly in a car accident in her 80’s. There’s nothing unique about her story or ours but like so many of her generation of Americans, the example she set for us lives on in all of our minds and our spirit as a family. Stella was a rock of a human being, a rapier of a gin rummy player, and when she ordered dessert first it was because you never know what might happen next, so if a restaurant has good dessert we definitely should have it while we can.

When Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 with regular Russian soldiers and sailors in unmarked uniforms in a brazen violation of the Geneva Convention and a long list of other international laws (to say nothing of the sovereignty of Ukraine), my parents and I agreed that this was why my grandmother Stella ate dessert first. You just never know. We could all imagine a Ukrainian family a lot like us enjoying a meal in a nice seaside restaurant while feeling confident in the stability of their nation and then running for safety from Vladimir Putin’s “little green men” before their soufflé arrived. I’m confident that when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated in quick succession Stella felt precisely the same impulse and acted on it, feeling as though the fabric and stability of our beloved Republic was fraying and teetering enough to feel genuinely uneasy. My grandmother was not a particularly political person – she was always far more focused instead on making sure that the machinery of the family kept everyone in line, on time, and well-fed. Still, she’s been on my mind quite a bit lately, and I’ve been wondering occasionally: should I be eating dessert first?

I watched video this morning of uniformed and armed but unidentified federal personnel tear-gassing protesters in Portland, Oregon and beating medical personnel attending to injured civilians. Should I order dessert first? I watched in horror this spring as heavily armed White Supremacist “militias” stormed the Michigan Statehouse, screaming at the security personnel and then menacing the legislators working to protect the public from the worst pandemic in a century. I’ve been imagining what the response of our elected officials in Washington would have been if those storming the statehouse had been Black – would they have been described as “good people”? What if they were Jews like me and my family? Maybe I should I go get a slice of chocolate cake just in case. And that was before George Floyd and Breonna Taylor - and countless others before them - were killed by the police officers whose oath to “protect and serve” seems to ring so hollow for so many of our fellow citizens. I just watched the episode of “Finding Your Roots” on PBS, celebrated Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s excellent program, where his guests were Rep. John Lewis and Sen. Corey Booker, and remembered that Prof. Gates was arrested by white police officers in 2009 while in his own home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is exceptionally unnerving to me that being a successful and intellectual Black man relaxing in your own home is enough to arouse suspicion that a crime is in progress in Cambridge. Get me to the nearest bakery.

The question, kidding aside, is whether the current tumult in America – pandemic, anti-intellectualism, hyper-politicization of what should be a national non-partisan quest for social justice – should cause any of us citizens to have our bags packed and one foot out the door, wolfing down our pecan pie just in case? Obviously, the answer is “no”. Resoundingly. I was born on July 4^th, I had an uncle named Sam, (Stella’s brother); I’m a life-long student of American history and have dedicated substantial time and energy to the study of American political philosophy and constitutional law; and I’m going nowhere. It’s not that I think we can rest on the work of our forbearers or that we should have no fears, but I prefer to go about my everyday life as though we live in the nation to which we aspire, the Republic that we expect it to become after we apply ourselves to the difficult task of making it so. This, after all, would be the spirit to which my hero Congressman John Lewis dedicated his life.

I’ll continue to linger over my dinner for a while and then consider what I’ll eat to finish it off with a little bit of sweetness. And perhaps we’ll find some bridges to march across together afterwards, with arms linked together and love in our hearts.