Finding Your Matzo Ball Soup | Writing Prompt #15
Sometimes silence is the sound of being known
John sits beside me humming and gazing out the window. He’s always humming, always thinking, always musing. He looks toward the Seattle skyline rising ahead of us.
“Emerald City!” he says. “Why do you think they call it that?”
Always asking questions, too. Always curious.
“Because of the trees, the moss, all the green stuff?”
“Mm,” he says, and in my periphery I see him bob his chin in a decisive nod. “That’s gotta be it.” I suspect he knows it is, but he likes to make sure I’m curious, too.
We’re on a “mission”—John’s term for anything he has to do that he’s deemed critical. Today, I’m driving my favorite retired soldier to go shoe shopping, and he has particular, bougie tastes. We are in search of the perfect pair of Mephisto loafers, and I already know how this is going to go. John will try on five or six different pairs, putting the salesperson through their paces. We’ll be in the exclusive shoe store for close to an hour. And we’ll leave, as we do every time, without a pair of shoes.
But it’s been a hell of a year. It’s 2020, and in March COVID descended and shut the world down. Millions died. Refrigerated semi trailers held bodies outside overflowing hospitals in New York City. We survived those long months of scuttling into grocery stores, masked and anxious, to pick up essentials. No live music, no festivals, no nights at the movies, and no dining out.
But carry-out is still a thing. And so is dining in the car.
Culinary exploration was at the heart of my relationship with John. He loved trying new types of foods and exploring new restaurants. Any time we traveled together— something we did often—his first question the moment we arrived, or sometimes even en route, was, “Well, darlin’, where we gonna eat?”
And today, after John put the poor saleswoman through her paces trying on many different pairs of Mephistos, often in multiple sizes “just in case,” we were going to look for a real Jewish deli. We’d experienced matzo ball soup at a local place the previous summer, but it had been a one-time special. We were on a mission to find the real deal somewhere in the heart of Seattle.
We left without shoes. Because of course we did. Despite John’s urgency—”I have got to get to Seattle to find them shoes!”—he was really just the world’s most dedicated window shopper. We were moving on to the “find sustenance” leg of our mission, so we sat in my Toyota Camry and Googled.
“There’s a place on Pine Street called Dingfelder’s,” I said.
“How many stars?”
“Five and a half.”
John pursed his lips and raised his eyes, pondering. “Not bad, not bad. Now, five stars would be—”
“Babe, it’s pretty unheard of for a restaurant to have five stars on Google. Four and a half is good.”
“Dingfelder’s it is, then!” he said, pointing his index finger toward the windshield and tipping it in a little “wagons, ho!” gesture. I set the GPS and off we went, our empty stomachs leading the way.
I have no doubt that when John and I rolled up on a restaurant we looked like an odd pair. He was 72, a Vietnam Veteran and former paratrooper who jumped out of the first plane he ever flew in, and a slim bow-legged Black man with the kindest eyes I’ve ever seen. I was 55, fat, and as pale-skinned as any auburn-haired, green-eyed woman of Nordic descent could be. But although we were mismatched, most people in the Pacific Northwest greeted us with delight rather than judgment.
Such was the case at Dingfelder’s, where a young man slid open the walk-up window and beamed at us. “What can I get you folks?” he asked.
We ordered two individual containers of matzo ball soup, two orders of potato latkes with sour cream and applesauce (because having both and refusing to choose sides is the power move, right?), some chocolate rugalech, and two bottles of iced tea.
When the server came back to the window with our late lunch in a big brown paper bag, he asked if we were taking our food home or needed utensils. (Dining in was still very much not a thing.) We told him we’d driven up from Olympia, so we’d be dining al fresco, or al Toyota Camry, at least. And then we returned to my car. We ate in the shade of a tree that was nearly done leafing out while the spring sunshine beamed through the window, causing leafy shadows to flicker and dance across the dashboard.
I could always tell when John and I had found The Perfect Food. During a good meal, we’d have animated discussions—we never ran out of things to talk about. But during a great meal, we were mostly silent.
Such was the case when we opened our “Grandma” matzo ball soups. John cut into a matzo ball and scooped up some of the savory chicken broth along with it, brought it to his lips, and then turned to me with raised eyebrows and an expression I could only interpret as “hot damn!”
We tore through our soup and latkes in silence—the ultimate compliment. John insisted that I take some soup home for my adult daughter, Shayla, so he ambled back to the walk-up window and ordered another soup, latkes, and some black and white cookies. “The kid needs to experience this,” he said in a hushed tone akin to religious fervor.
That COVID year was the beginning of a decline for John. As the virus stripped away all of the things he used to cope with the legacy of C-PTSD his military service left him—movie theaters he could slip into, restaurants he could linger in, music performances he could enjoy swaying and humming to—he slowly lost his spark. His kind eyes began to look haunted. He spent more time at home texting me from his recliner. I started booking quarterly Airbnb getaways to draw him out of the house and into the world, and they helped, but the psychic damage the pandemic wrought ran deep. Although I tried to keep his spirits alive, I could feel him giving up.
In 2022, John died from complications of what should have been relatively minor surgery in Madigan Army Hospital. The man who, a few months into our relationship, looked into my eyes and said with amazement, “I’ve known you all my life!” was gone.
Anger is a potent part of grief. I was angry at Madigan, at the pandemic, at circumstances, at the universe—forces that conspired to take John away. But mostly, I was bereft of the one person who knew me so intimately that eating matzo ball soup in silence, forgoing the need to fill that Camry cabin with conversation, was the ultimate declaration of a day well spent.
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