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            Eau de “Popsie "

 

Father’s Day is on our heels once more .

I think of my late father- Robert Saul Adams- and exclaim :

“ Now there was a man who never broke a sweat !”

It’s true; he was the most naturally clean-smelling man I ever met …

 

But my beloved memories are those of my Popsie, Isaac- aka- Ike Cohen, my mother’s father, who lived with us.

 

Popsie left Minsk at age two, when he emigrated to the infamously impoverished  Whitechapel district of Queen Victoria’s London.

He came to Ellis Island in 1900 at the age of fourteen, with one of his younger brothers Jacob [who became the first Orthodox Jewish cowboy veterinarian for the U.S. government’s horses !].

 

 

 

 

Ike brought all his olfactory memories with him; cherished Eastern European delicacies he shared with me, in the early hours before anyone else had risen for the day.

 

“Dye-dee-dye-dee dye-dye…you’re my palsy-walsy-galsy”

 

Ike would croon in a tuneless niggun, as he smoothed out yesterday’s New York Daily News on the kitchen tabletop.

“That’s all this Scheisse is fit for !  Smoked whitefish ! “

 

Popsie lovingly spread out the chubs on the newsprint; he didn’t want to ‘stink up the dishes’ with it.

“That’s how we ate fish and chips “ he nodded, deftly pouring two inches of  hot black coffee into a large glass filled with milk and sugar.

The aroma of smoked fish, sweet milky java, and piping hot toast filled my sleepy nostrils.

Under the broiler, the ‘toast’ was bubbling with fresh Muenster cheese, Popsie’s specialty.

 

 

 

 

“Jack the Ripper caught a kipper “ he chortled, as he lay our feast on the paper; I clambered up his stalwart leg, and seated myself on his knee, nuzzling his well-shaved chin.

It smelled of Palmolive Brushless Shave Cream, and a drop or two of British Sterling…

Soapy, faintly spicy / musky, with an ambery warmth about it.

 

Popsie had been failing for awhile; he’d had several successive heart attacks [ at home], and I was responsible for most of his care.As a result of poor cerebral blood flow, he was dementing at a rapid rate.

He had awakened me at 2 am that morning, in order to shave him with his straight-edge Wilkinson sword blade and strop; there was NO refusing him.

 

“What if I cut your throat ?” I timidly appealed.

“ Don’t worry. It’s been a good life“, he good-naturedly retorted.

 

I lathered up the fluffy old badger brush, still redolent of the musky, animalic  bristles with which it was made, and the creamy, mild- scented soap [ which can best be described as smelling faintly of both olives and clean babies’ bottoms ] .

 

 

 

 

Popsie lives on in my memory to this very day; he’s my guardian angel, and our first-born bears his name.

No one will ever move me as he did.

He taught me how to live- and how to die.

Rest well, Besherteleh.

 

Ida Meister, Sr. Editor