Bobby Bacala, Save Some for Me

I totally understand Bobby Bacala.

Bobby Bacala is one of Tony Soprano’s men in the Italian gangster show, The Sopranos. In one episode, Bobby Bacala’s wife is killed in a car accident. Mourning her death, he refuses to eat the last batch of baked ziti that she made. Only an Italian could understand such dedication to food.

I thought about Bobby Bacala when my refrigerator broke several days ago. It didn’t exactly break, but it stopped cooling consistently (that pesky light still goes on, though). Everything in my freezer melted when I was away at school. By the evening, everything was back to its icy state.

Having an on-again, off-again refrigerator just won’t cut it, especially with summer upon us. So I dumped the rotting food in the fridge section and saved some of the items in the frozen section, hoping that the fridge would miraculously decide to work again permanently. It hasn’t.

Desperate to have some fresh food in the house until I get the fridge fixed, I borrowed an ice chest to house a few perishables like milk and eggs. I figured that would give me a little time until I get the fridge repaired. As I was in the market buying what few items would fit in the ice chest, I got a call from Marjorie.

She was so excited—Rebecca is back for the summer from college, and she brought her dorm refrigerator with her—and did I want to borrow it?

Of course I wanted to borrow it! With the extra room, I added a few more luxury perishables to my shopping list, including a precious brick of Tillamook cheddar. My life was coming back to normal.

For the past few days, I’ve been carefully filling that little fridge with food, and unceremoniously throwing out bad food from the broken fridge. It feels good—making things simpler, smaller, and reducing my carbon footprint. I could live like this in a wonderfully minimalistic way. Maybe I'll even use that large refrigerator space for bookshelves.

It wasn’t until today, though, that I decided to completely give up on the old one. Today is trash day, so I dumped everything into the stinky smelly trash bin. But I paused when I got to the freezer. Inside the freezer is my most cherished possession: the last batch of spaghetti sauce that my mom ever made.

Occasionally she would give me some of her sauce to freeze for a time when I was too tired to cook. There is nothing in this world that tastes like her spaghetti sauce. Over the years, I’ve learned to make it myself, but it doesn’t have that loving, mom touch. Anyway, she always dated the food she gave us, and this one was dated February 9, 1999. She died four months later, before I had ever used the sauce.

I’ve kept that sauce in my freezer all these years. Like Bobby Bacala, I refuse to give up on the love for that person I have cherished more than anyone. The sauce is probably frozen down to a tiny cube of red ice, but even then, I know it has a piece of my mom. It has her love and her caring and her years of experience of Italian cooking. If nothing else, it has DNA from her saliva when she tasted it. She is really inside that container. Whatever it has, it is the most important material thing my mom left me.

I paused at the freezer as I held this container of spaghetti sauce, housed in an old Cool Whip tub. Like everything else in the freezer, it had melted. Maybe this is a sign. It’s June, after all—the month of my mom’s birthday, and the month of her death. Maybe it’s time to give up the spaghetti sauce. It’s just the physical form of a memory, and I’ll always have that memory. Maybe it’s time to let go.

Feeling a little melancholy, I brought that tub of my mom’s last batch of spaghetti sauce over to the tiny refrigerator that has lived in Rebecca’s freshman dorm room all year. I opened the door, and I squeezed that tub into the teeny tiny freezer compartment. It fits perfectly next to the miniature ice cube tray.

Thank you, Marjorie, for the freezer--like a super hero, you always come through with exactly what I need. My mom is still around, living in Rebecca's fridge. The month of June is kind of tough, so I'm grateful that you have helped me hang on to her a little longer.

Ultimately, Bobby Bacala acquiesced to family pressure to serve his wife's last dish of pasta. I haven't reached that point, but Bobby and I certainly agree on one thing: you can hold onto that special someone as long as they fit in your freezer.