Remembrances of Corned Beef Hash

The coolest thing just happened. I’m working on a jewelry project and after re-shaping some sterling silver wire with a torch, I had to let it “pickle” – that is, rest in a weak acid bath to clean up any heat discoloration. While I waited, I went up to the attic where we have our extra storage to get a roll of paper towels. There’s a little cubby hole in the wall at the top of the stairs that we hadn’t yet looked in after my husband and I moved into my grandparents' old apartment, upstairs from the one I grew up in and where my mom still lives. Just for kicks I decided to open the door and see if there was anything in there. Mostly it was just junk – scraps of wallpaper and a jar of dried-up wallpaper paste that’s probably older than I am.

BUT, there was also something that I’d been wishing I knew where it was, and thought for sure I’d never see again. After my grandparents passed away my parents had hired someone to clean out the attic and basement, and sold pretty much anything that was worth anything, including my all-metal pedal fire engine from when I was a kid, to a second-hand store. Since that was the single most valuable thing, they gave me the money for it, but I was still so upset that they would have just sold something like that without even asking me if I wanted it, at least to give to a friend or relative’s kid if I didn’t have any of my own (I was 28 then, it still could have happened.) So I didn’t expect to see anything good still up there.

Yet there it was, covered in dust: My grandfather’s old cast iron hand-cranked meat grinder, the kind that clamps to the edge of the kitchen table, that we used to make corned beef hash. I used to actually like it back then, I had it for the first time in years at a diner a while back and didn’t care for it at all – maybe my tastes had changed, maybe it just wasn’t as good as my granddad made. I know you can still buy those old-fashioned grinders and the antique ones (no probably about this; it is definitely many years older than I am) have their collectors. But this one is personal; I loved my grandfather. Even though he was my father’s stepfather and technically not related to me at all, he was the member of my family that I was closest to growing up.

It wasn't until after he passed away that I learned he was not only a WWII veteran, but a bona fide hero: I found the letter from his CO recommending him for the Bronze Star and Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster, in addition to his Purple Heart. I knew that he'd enlisted as a medic because he refused to carry a gun but wanted to serve the country that his parents had emigrated to only a few decades earlier. I did not know that his unit came under heavy fire in Italy, and in the course of retrieving fallen soldiers from the battlefield, he had been shot multiple times and lost so much blood that he had to be airlifted out to a hospital. The fact that he survived at all can only be attributed to his being too stubborn to die before treating all of the men under his care. Growing up, I had no idea that the gentle man who stopped mowing the lawn one day because we'd found a toad in the yard had ever been shot at all, let alone come so close to dying in the war. I'm thankful that he survived, and I'm sure those soldiers whose lives he saved were too.

One of the reasons I felt so strongly about wanting to live in this apartment and feel so at home here is that I spent so much time here as a kid. Our bedroom was his; he and my grandmother had separate bedrooms and I’m actually sitting here typing this in her old room. Our kitchen table is where theirs was, and the chair that I usually sit at when I’m eating is almost exactly where I would have sat when we were grinding up leftover boiled dinner to make hash. He’d let me crank it to grind the vegetables, but then he would have to do the meat because it was harder to get through and I was 5,6,7 when we’d do this. (Freak out if you want that my most beloved family member let me operate a meat grinder while I was in elementary school – it was the 1970s, and people were more adventurous back then.) I left it up there for now. One of these days I’ll bring it downstairs, clean it up, and put it back in the same drawer where he kept it. Right now it’s like finding a magic window to look back on the past, to when my grandfather had just retired, and I had the whole summer off from school and we had all the time in the world to spend together. And honestly? I’ll probably never use the thing again. But I’m never getting rid of it, either.