I opened a favorite book and found the laminated recipe, titled Fluke in Chablis Sauce, handwritten in my mother’s perfect script. As with all things her, it was both beautifully positive, ending with Bon Appetit! Reading it brought me back to the day we followed it.
That day dawned bright pink around the edges of the horizon, and I was out fly-fishing Double Creek, a place where the tidal flood and ebb of Barnegat Bay etches deep channels in its soft shifting sands. I was fishing the inside of the dike, a man-made spit of land and a place of bayberry snags, sod banks, and with the west wind, horrendous swarms of biting greenhead flies.
Fluke, known as summer flounder in the south, are a favorite species of anglers there. They are a staple of summer fishing on Long Beach Island, NJ, a place of memories that still brings me back. Fluke enter the saltwater bays of the mid-Atlantic in early summer. They are drawn by the warming of the water and return to the home of their rearing with the turning of the season to summer. There they take up haunts, hiding in the bay bottom, perfectly camouflaged, ambushing prey. They are there for the plenty of the season, becoming larger and highly predatory as they grow into their 12 – 14 years on this good earth.
These were the early days of my mother’s shining light dimming. She stood beside me as we followed the steps, adorning two large fluke fillets from my morning trip with the recipe’s contents, a work of art to be delightfully enjoyed and not forgotten. At this stage in her disease, my mother was still “with it” as one might say. You could forgive her repeating or forgetting things, but you could not forgive where it would go.
We worked together, my mother executing the small tasks I gave her with her usual precision, as she had once done the larger tasks of life, graduating high school valedictorian, marrying and bringing three children into this world, cooking, cleaning, editing papers, reviewing homework, running a sales office, and all else that makes a life.
We placed the dish in the oven, set at 400 degrees, and in 40 minutes, the baking was done. I retrieved and placed the platter at the center of the table, the dish still bubbling, the now-ivory fillets simmering. I then ladled the Chablis cream sauce over the fillets, thin slices of lemon atop them. Mom was seated and seemed well-pleased with the meal. Garden-fresh asparagus was served alongside the plated fluke, with a spring greens salad. We all toasted the meal with chilled martinis.
I’ll selfishly admit it was a delicious dinner. The fluke was velvety mild, the Chablis sauce like butter with a touch of fruity nose from the Chablis. We sat and quietly enjoyed the meal – my father characteristically silent as he inhaled large portions of it – meaning it was very good. My mother ate at her piece, eliciting compliments all the while but never truly cleaning her plate.
Years after she passed, my sister and I shared such a meal during a visit. “You know”, she said, “Mom never liked fish”. I was dumbfounded – never had I heard or thought such a thing. She always raved, even when I prepared the strong-flavored bluefish we’d catch through summer and fall. But that was Mom – never self-indulgent, ever selfless. Always the focus was on you.
We had more meals of the bounty of the sea in the following years as my mother’s candle dimmed, and they were all good, but unbeknownst to me still then, not to her liking.
Stephen Covey, esteemed author of “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” once wrote about the social-emotional connection that is the foundation of so much of life. One father he knew, sensing his son’s distance, wanted to more deeply connect with his young son, who was a baseball addict. This father decided that he and his son would attend a game in every city in which his son’s favorite team played across the country for a year, an obviously huge commitment in time and money. Upon hearing the plan, Covey commented to the father, “you must really like baseball to do such a thing”, to which the father replied. “No, I don’t like baseball, but I love my son.”
And so it was with my mother to the last of her days, that she loved me far beyond her own likes, favoring my own.
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