MY PROUSTIAN TRADITION WITH HOT CROSS BUNS

I ventured out in zero degree weather and put on gloves, a scarf, my Berlin fur hat, and overcoat. I got cash at the bank, computer ink at Staples, picked up our mail at the post office, and got food for the weekend – brisket of beef for an Irish corned beef and cabbage boiled meal.  I also got a box of six hot cross buns.  Every Lenten season I look forward to the appearance of hot cross buns.  As a child growing up in the Depression, I remember the occasions when my mother would stop at a Hanscom Bakery in Manhattan and my brother and I would each get a hot cross bun.  I thus pay tribute each year to my mother, not an easy person to love because of her paranoid schizophrenia, but a person with a generous heart, very caring and protective, who was my biggest fan. She encouraged my brother Roland and me to read a lot, paint a lot, and visit museums frequently. How I bless her vision of the free culture available in New York City that she found for us to enjoy – Central Park, Van Cortland Park, Crotona Park, Prospect Park, the Bronx  Zoo (free once a week for the public then). We enjoyed pizza on Mulberry street (five cents a slice).  I savored the beef pie in the Automat, slivers of roast pork from a Chinese food store on Mott Street, pastrami sandwiches on Delancy street washed down with Dr. Brown’s cream soda.  I think of my mother as possessed of the spirit of Io, the Greek cow that wandered from shore to shore always driven by an impulse to see something new.  We got to see the neighborhoods of Manhattan.  One weekend it would be Battery Park, another it would be Yorkville and treats from the German delicatessens. We would then go another week to Washington Market, then a huge collection of shops mostly Turkish, Syrian, Egyptian, and other Moslems making a living in what would become the future site of the World Trade Center. One of my favorite candies there was a bag of Turkish Delights a soft chewy candy like a gum drop but dusted with confectioner’s sugar and having a delicate exotic flavor.  On a hot day we would be treated to a Charlotte Rousse, a disk of sponge cake supporting a crown of whipped cream and a cherry on the top.  The circular small cake was enclosed in a white paper container. 

Each bite of my warmed hot cross bun serves as a touchstone to my childhood.  I find it ironic that in the season of Lenten sacrifice these buns appear not as a sacrifice or incentive for self-purification, but as a reminder of the goodness of life, the small pleasures that sustain us, and the persistence of memory. Nedra and I have sinfully eaten two.  The remaining two will greet us for breakfast.  I will then wait another year to break my fast of hot cross buns.  I do so not out of some spiritual or religious duty, but as a way to say “Thank you, Ma.”