Voices: Generation Gratitude

The point at which the sticky, stretching mass
Of ingredients in your hands
Magically transforms into a smooth ball of dough
Is a cooking orgasm.
The natural point to stop and take a cigarette break.
It’s December but no coat is needed
Better to absorb the life-affirming sunshine.
I am surprised by a vision as I sit smoking
On the front porch in my apron.
I imagine making pierogies at Christmastime
Every year from now on
And every year coming outside after the dough suddenly gels
To smoke a cigarette.
Even after I’ve quit. It will be just that one a year.
So now I could be 60 years old
Living this same moment in the future — deja when
But I can’t imagine living that long.




This is the poem I wrote last weekend as my sister, my best friend and I took a Saturday out of our busy holiday schedules to make pierogies from scratch.

Yeah, the poem needs some work, but it helped me find the soul of my column this week. And why not shake things up with a little free verse?

Guided by Grandma Grega’s recipe and instruction, Stacy, Maureen and I worked together for six hours (breaks included) to prepare 250 pierogies — some potato and cheese, some cabbage. We were grateful to have each other’s company because the monotony of our chore quickly became apparent. Our great-grandmothers — Hungarian, Lithuanian, and Slovak — used to do this weekly, I figured. Standing in their simple coal-miner’s homes, stretching every penny as far it would go. Maureen’s great-grandmothers were Irish, but in joining Stacy and I in this resurrection of our culinary tradition, she was revisiting the same heritage we were.

The pierogie making knowledge has not been passed down naturally. As far as I know, my mother has never made a single pierogie from scratch. Stacy had to ask for instruction in order to later teach us. And when she asked, my grandmother didn’t understand why she would want to bother.

Weren’t we modern women? Hadn’t we “decided” to work outside the home? Hadn’t we made a conscious decision to limit the number of children we would bear so we might afford luxuries like store-bought pierogies?

Before Saturday, I had never thought of store-bought pierogies as a luxury. In my mind, they had always been a substitute for the real thing. No offense Mrs. T, but you were all we could get out in Tucson, Arizona. Just another processed item I was forced to accept because the luxury I lived without was time.

The difference between generations loomed over our heads as we stood in Stacy’s kitchen, hoping some genetic residue would submerge and help our pierogies take the expected shape more readily. Looking at Maureen, I sensed she, like me, couldn’t imagine living the life of our great-grandmothers. One defined so precisely by repetition and predictability. One not so abundant with art and entertainment and spontaneous possibility and a mind-numbing spectrum of choices.

And I think that’s the underlying reason we gave ourselves the assignment to write a poem about our day of pierogie making. We didn’t have to do this every week. No one expected it from us. It was our choice, in fact, whether to make pierogies from scratch ever again. In drawing attention to the luxury we enjoyed beyond all others — the ability to live artistically fulfilling lives — we were celebrating the progress women had made in society. What our foremothers knew to be a fact of every day life, we were able to experience as a kind of adventure! Our intention was to explore the past and continue a tradition; to make something with our hands so authentic its value could not possibly be questioned — as if we had questioned the value of our independent, freedom-rich lives. No wonder my grandmother didn’t understand.



-- alicia grega-pikul, 16 december 2004

Send email to: apikul@timesshamrock.com.