8. My dad, maker of sandwiches
Or, How to let someone love you
This is about a time in my life when my dad would make me Denver omelette sandwiches to eat during handbell practice.
I know that’s a lot to unpack, so we’ll go through it item by item.
Item 1 - Life
Life at this particular moment is Montreal, where I was born. We live at 133 Pickwood Crescent in a bungalow, which is North American for a one-story house. My family moved to Montreal from Scotland, after my parents failed to secure a location for a restaurant.
I only learned about this last April, 42 years after the fact. Of all the “what-ifs” in my family’s history, this is the biggest one for me. How would my life have been different, growing up in a kitchen with a Glaswegian brogue? How much more attractive would I be with a Scottish accent? So many questions.
Item 2 - The Denver omelette
The Denver omelette, which Americans insist on spelling omelet, has six essential ingredients: eggs, cheese, diced ham, mushrooms, onions, and green peppers. A Denver omelette can have more ingredients, but it crucially can’t have fewer.
My dad, knowing both my love of the sandwich and the financial strains of supporting a young family, started making them for me at home so I wouldn’t have to buy them from the cafe near our church. I want to say I really appreciated this, and told him so repeatedly. This wasn’t the case. This wasn’t the case at all.
Item 3 - Handbell practice
My church had a handbell ensemble and for a year or so I was part of it. During that time I knew how to read music, which is wild to me now. It’s wild because I can’t remotely read it anymore, and I don’t know what happened to that part of my brain. It’s like realising at one point in my life I knew Latin.
The group was lead by a retired teacher who, and this probably seems obvious, really loved handbells. He loved handbells more than most people love anything. That’s how you get things like a handbell ensemble.
So that’s the context. And the point is, my dad was making me these sandwiches, and at the time I didn’t understand what that meant. You might reasonably ask, why does it have to mean something? But it does, because it does.
Item 4 - The point
What can a son give his dad? I’ve thought about this an unreasonable amount. My dad, thankfully for him, doesn’t need my financial support. He doesn’t need my success in any way, other than to enjoy it along with me.
I used to think my dad didn’t need anything from me, which is very much a teenage thing to think. Your dad goes from being this person you look up to and admire to someone who seems only to be in your way, deliberately misunderstanding you. Because I spent a good part of my life deliberately misunderstanding myself, I thought some version of this for far too long.
Until one day, and I mean this literally, I was thinking about those sandwiches. I was standing in my kitchen, thinking about my dad making them for me. Getting up early on a Sunday, beating the eggs, toasting the bread. And I thought, why would a man get up early to make his son his favourite sandwich?
And I started to cry.
So I wrote my dad a letter, and one part of it was me saying I know why you made me those sandwiches. I probably seemed a bit insane.
The distance between two men can feel insurmountable. And one thing a son can give his dad to cross that gap is recognition. Not just the recognition of hard work, although there is that, but the recognition of how one man tells another man he loves him. Especially if one of those men grew up in a time and culture that did not celebrate the verbal language to do so.
And so I understand why my dad made me those sandwiches. I recognise why he made them. Because sometimes a sandwich is just a sandwich, and sometimes it’s a whole entire heart.
Cool extra fact from this article:
What is the most likely, says Miller and other historians, is that the Denver Omelet originated from a dish concocted by Chinese immigrants who worked on the railroads out West. Egg foo young, a mix of beaten eggs, minced ham and various vegetables, was popular among the American Chinese community. Rail workers likely put the dish on bread to carry it with them.