Month: June 2016

Dadddy Did What?!

Posted on by nlghanayem

If one knew my father, then they would understand that the title of this post was uttered numerous times throughout my childhood, and still is.  However, in his defense, most times were provoked.  It was one such provocation that put his restraint or lack of into question.

I was no more than two years old as my mother was still pregnant with my brother when my father was almost arrested.  My mother and I were at home when she received a call saying that the police were at the deli, and my father might be in trouble.  I know what some might be thinking…what could the kind, smiling man pictured above possibly have done to warrant the need for law enforcement?  Well, let us just chalk it up to a good old fashioned ethnic temper, a trait that I, unfortunately, inherited.  See, my father had the smile of a saint, the vocabulary of a sailor, the temper of a viper, and the heart of a lion, true, loyal, and pure to the core.  Much of these attributes have stood the test of time.  Yes, even his temper.

It was 1986, and my father had stopped taking personal checks as a form of payment as he had been having too many of them bounce.  On one such busy day, a customer of foreign decent wanted to pay with a personal check.  My father politely declined, and informed the man that he no longer took personal checks.  To this, the man became irate.  He huffily informed my father that he did not know how to run a business.  My father remained calm and continued to explain his reasoning to the man, even though he had the right to refuse the payment.  The viper temper had been heroically put into check until the male customer in question made a vital mistake…well, three vital mistakes, in fact.  After a few minutes of arguing, the man called my father a stupid Arab, spit on the deli’s glass front door, and spat the words “spit on America”.   To this display of irrationality, twenty eight year old Salem Ghanayem, father and husband, who had immigrated to this country when he was five, had only one choice.  He punched the angry, spitting customer squarely in the face…twice.  It was all very dramatic.  The police were called and small droplets of blood were spilled.  When my mother arrived with me in tow, and my cousin, who was an attorney, by her side, two policemen had my father outside the restaurant’s front door questioning him.  I remember thinking, “Is my daddy going to jail?”  In the car, my mother had told me what my father had done, but not why.  My mother was not one to sugar coat things, especially to her children.  She didn’t hide much from us, which, in terms of parenting, can only go one of two ways.  I like to think her instincts were correct, and that my brother, sister, and I are better people for it, even if it was vastly uncomfortable at times.  Luckily, my father was never charged and he was able to go about his day, due to a good Samaritan customer, who had witnessed the exchange and convinced the officers that he was an off-duty cop who saw the whole ordeal, and vouched for my temperamental father.  In actuality, the mystery customer was just angry at how my father was treated and so he came to his defense.  He was definitely not a member of law enforcement.

So, my father was in the clear, until later that night when my grandfather, my mother’s father, called and wanted to see him.  My grandfather had heard about the incident, and wasn’t happy.  See, word travels fast in ethnic communities, and in the Arab community of Jacksonville, Florida, word of mouth was like wildfire.  It took one spark, and the whole thing went up in smoke.  Cliché, but no less true.  Since, my grandfather’s nickname was “the godfather” as he was the oldest member of our community, the news of the day always got back to him.  Apparently, there were some Iranian friends in town, and the man my father had punched was the son-in-law of one of the elders.  So, my father was called before “the don” to explain himself.  And my father did.  He told my grandfather what the man had said and done to which my grandfather replied, with his mouth half open in astonishment, “He did what?”.  My father repeated himself twice before my grandfather in his thick middle eastern accent said, “I would have hit him again”.   My father was saved for the second time that day.

So, what was it that caused my father to lose his temper in the first place?  What was it that allowed my grandfather to promote my father’s obvious loss of control?  One word.  Patriotism.  To men, like my father and grandfather, who came to this country whether to build something better or were the product of that dream, any threat to it was inexcusable.  The irate male customer had spit on my father’s “soda pop” dream, literally.  He had reduced my father’s heritage to a despicable, slanderous word, and he had unforgivably insulted the country that gave him the opportunity to have a dream in the first place.  To them, it warranted a good ass-kicking.

Looking back, I can’t say I blame my father.  As we travel through life, especially in today’s chaotic and violent world, we lose sight of the real heart of a tradition.  We forget that not all immigrants are the enemy, and that not all natives are friends.  Don’t misunderstand.  In this instance, he was blameless.  However, in all of his confrontations with customers throughout the years, he wasn’t always so innocent.  No worries, though.  That was my father’s only knock out thus far.  The best lesson I learned as I went through life was “Don’t poke the Salem!”  I’m still not very good at heeding this advice.

 

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The Little Arab Girl Gets A Bubbie

Posted on by nlghanayem

When I wasn’t pillaging the dessert case, I was inserting plastic forks into electrical sockets. Yes, this happened.  I knew not to go near it, but my mother wasn’t looking, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.  So, I experimented with a plastic fork.  Just as I was about to go in, plastic prong poised above the opening of the outlet, my mother stopped me with a loud and resounding “Don’t do that!”  My investigation was over.  She was a buzz kill like that, always preventing me from hurting myself or burning the place down.  It was at this point that she began to let me socialize with the customers.  They usually got a big kick out of playing with the roaming toddler, and it was out of this social time that I eventually became the adopted granddaughter of Sidney and Myrtle Goldblatt.   Don’t misunderstand, I spent an inordinate amount of time with my mother’s parents, who, also, owned a restaurant, but when I could no longer stand the boredom or my parents needed a break, it was Sidney and Myrtle that rescued me as they only lived two minutes down the road from the deli.

Sid and Emma, I called them, were a Jewish couple that used to frequent the deli before my father bought it.  Emma was actually a sweet southern gal that had converted when she married Sid.  They had a daughter, whom they had adopted in infancy, but since she was in her teens, I didn’t see her much.  However, she had a devil dog named Abe.  He was a poodle from hell who was not used to children, and on more than one occasion he would trap me on Emma’s reclining chair.  So, it was to be that on most days, after they came in for their coffee, which they drank black with sweet n’ low and are the very reason that I, also, drink my coffee black, I was whisked off to their house, where I was allowed to play and eat to my heart’s content.  I drank coke with crushed ice, and ate matza crackers.  I, even, had my own shelf in the snack cabinet that was at my eye level.  In fact, it was during one such day of rummaging in the cabinet that I let out my first expletive.  I was hungry, as usual, and I was  looking for something delicious to eat when I found nothing to my liking.  To this, I slammed the cabinet door and yelled “Fuck It!”  Emma wasn’t happy, to say the least, and she had a very long talk that afternoon with my father about watching his language in front of his two-year old daughter.

I knew the dradle song by the time I was four years old, and during Hanukkah, Emma would give me chocolate gold coins.  One year, she gave me a guitar!  I loved that thing, but my mother wouldn’t let me play with it.  She thought I was still too young.  Most of my childhood is wrapped up in the Goldblatt’s.  However, I did not have Sidney for very long.  He passed when I was five rather suddenly of acute lymphatic leukemia.  He was gone in a matter of weeks.  From what I can remember, Emma took it pretty hard.  I started spending more time with her after that.  There are three things that I will never forget about Sid.  He held me in his reclining chair and would rock me to sleep for my naps.  He took me fishing on their dock.  Their house was on a lake.  And I had a rather nasty habit of picking my nose, so, whenever my finger found its way up a nostril, Sid would ask me if I was “digging for gold”.  There’s a portrait of him hanging in my parent’s home.

As I said, I spent more time with Emma after Sidney’s death.  She would take me up and down the south coast, all the way to Myrtle Beach.  We visited her sister’s cabin in Clayton, GA quite often, and we would sing on the way.  She took me to the Cabbage Patch hospital to visit, and she bought me my first pair of moccasins and cowboy boots.  The moccasins stuck…the cowboy boots, not so much.  She bought me my first pair of ice skates, and it was because of her volunteering and running the concessions at the, then, coliseum that I learned to skate.  Although, I used to get yelled at for walking on concrete without my blade guards, skating became my favorite thing to do.  I was heartbroken when the city stopped putting ice down.  She took me to visit the home she was born in.  Emma was one of seven brothers and sisters.  Her mother passed away when she was sixteen, and she sort of raised herself and some of her siblings.  Although, for her sixteenth birthday, her mother had bought her a small wrist watch and she kept it until she later passed it on to me.  She told me it was a tradition her mother had started with her brothers and sisters.  I’ll never forget what she said to me when she gave it to me.  She said that she wanted me to have it because she didn’t know of anyone that would take care of it.  Even at ten years old, I remember thinking it was odd because Emma had a daughter.  She wasn’t wrong, though.  The watch rests in my jewelry box still in the bag she handed it to me in.

I not only seemed to fill a small void in Emma’s life, but it seemed that she filled a void in my young life, as well.  I was turning six when my father’s mother had passed away.  I did not get much time with her as she and my grandfather had only moved to Jacksonville from San Francisco a few years before, and she spent much of that time sick.  At the time of her death, my grandmother was only sixty.  So, it was Emma that filled the void I felt in my grandmother’s passing.  In fact,  I was with Emma the day my parents got the call, and it was Emma who broke the news to me.  From then on, if my mother’s mother couldn’t attend, it was Emma who came to every Grandparent’s day at my school.  As time went on and I grew up, I saw Emma less.  I wasn’t going to the restaurant as much because I had started driving,  and school was taking up more of my time.  When I would see her, she would kind of guilt me for not seeing her enough or coming to stay with her.  Emma had always wanted me to live with her.  She hated being alone, and I wasn’t ready to leave my mother.  So, when it came to Emma, my feelings became muddled.  Teenage guilt and frustration kept me from seeing her as often as I should have.

Emma eventually stopped coming into the diner…yes, she was around for the deli to diner transformation.  She loved it!  We lost track of her, and no one knew where she was.  My parents couldn’t get in touch with her family.  Until one day, a niece visited the restaurant and informed us that Emma had been put into a nursing home, but we didn’t know which one.  The search for Emma lasted a couple of years, longer than it should have, before my parents got the call.  I was working in my father’s current business, Johnny Angels, when my mother pulled me to the side.  She said, “Nikki, we got a call about Emma…”  I’ll never know what she was going to say because I didn’t give her a chance to finish her words.  In that split second, I knew what she was going to tell me.  Emma was gone.  I would never get to say “goodbye” or tell her that I loved her.  I would never get to apologize for abandoning her because that’s what I felt like I had done.   The tears didn’t stop for a while, but I had tables to take care of so I had to get my emotions under control.  I had let Emma down. Sometimes, I still feel that way.  During one of the toughest times of my adolescent life, during the period Emma had gone missing, I would drive by her home and remember the safety and serenity I always felt in the two-story structure.  I have very few memories that do not include the woman who started out as a customer but ended up as family.

 

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There’s Still Some Flavor Left…

Posted on by nlghanayem

Before the cheeseburgers and shakes flooded our lives, the diner life started as the deli life.  The daughter of Palestinian Americans, it was inevitable for me to have been born into a family business, my birth right even.  As an Arab,  one’s family usually owned one of the following establishments: a dry cleaners, a restaurant, or a grocery store.  My mother’s father owned the last two at separate points in his life, and from that legacy, my mother tutored my father in the culinary art of owning a restaurant.

I was born into a small deli with a cash register dividing both the dessert case from the meat case that ran the expanse of the  front of the store.  Being the early 1980s, orange and black chairs littered the dining room, and the walls were covered in a newspaper print that looked like a very early likeness of Michael Jackson.  In fact, until I was around 10 years old, I thought it was Michael Jackson, and I wondered how my father got him on our walls.

As a relatively small child, I was allowed the run of the place.  See, when I assert that I was born into a restaurant, I am very serious.  So serious in fact, that my mother likes to inappropriately point out at astronomically inopportune times that I was not only raised in the family business, I was conceived in it, as well. So, from the day I was brought home from the hospital until I went to school, I spent my days in a restaurant.  My mother set up a playpen behind the counter, and when we were not as busy, she would allow me to wander the kitchen in my walker.  Once I had surpassed needing help to walk, all hell broke loose.  At this point, I was no more than 3 years old wandering behind the counter with my brother in the playpen sleeping.  Joey had just been born as we are two years apart.  I was always jealous of how much he got to sleep. To keep myself occupied and out of the way during the lunch rush, I became very adept at entertaining myself.  I had rules that I never followed, and as a result, I was in absolutely everything.

When my mother wasn’t looking, I would crack the door on the dessert case, and sneak my little hand in.  I would pick the dried frosting off the side of the brownie pan, and the pecans off of the top of the pecan squares.  If I was feeling especially bold, I would grab whole cookies and large pieces of baklava.  It was the sweet life.  When my father was tied up cooking on the grill or making sandwiches, I would climb the over 6 foot  refrigerator and steal cans of Coke and bottles of Perrier.  For a two-year old, I had refined tastes.  It must be noted that not all of my escapades were so adorable.  I am ashamed to admit that I, too, was once a disgusting child.  After the lunch rush, I would often take naps on the chairs at the tables.  Yes, please have  a seat, and don’t mind the two-year old napping.  It was during such naps that I found my favorite table.

The reason for my picking this delightful little area to hide was due to a very large, very pink half chewed piece of bubblegum stuck to  the bottom corner of my favorite table.  I remember when I first found it.  It looked so sweet and so pink.  I felt compelled to taste it, and so I licked the half chewed morsel. It was just as I had suspected.  It still had flavor!  From then on, I would taste a little bit here and there from the glorious sweetness…until my father found out that I was trying to eat the gum off of the bottom of the tables and had them cleaned.  I had lost the whole reason for choosing my favorite table in the first  place.  I was crushed. However, on the bright side, I had strengthened my immune system two-fold.

Soda Pops and Sundaes

Posted on by nlghanayem

It’s not the décor of a place nor the service of the staff that gives stone and concrete a heartbeat.  It’s not the vacancy of the parking lot nor the food being served that allows a stand alone building to develop  a soul.  It’s the people…employees and customers alike that make up the value of a business.  Watching with one’s own eyes is the only proof that is needed  to attest to the strength, oddity, and humor of the human spirit.

Growing up in a family business allows for a rare insight into the lives of  those that pass through the doors whether they be employee or  customer.  So, in that regard, I embark on tales of soda pops and sundaes where it is not the food being evaluated but those that are ordering it.

Growing up, my father owned a fifties diner on the south side of the city.  When he and my mother bought the small space in a strip mall, it was actually a Jewish deli.  It stayed a deli for about ten years before my dad got the itch to renovate.  Some might think it odd for a Palestinian ex-cop from San Francisco to own a deli turned diner, unless you where one of the rare few that actually knew my father.  He was an odd amalgamation of stereotypes, but it made him who he was.  He looked like any brown ethnic guy should with the heart of a cowboy, the temperament of an Italian hit man, and the imagination of a stoner.  And it was this strange mixture that urged my father’s fascination with the golden era of America, where the American dream was alive and well, living in the hearts of all who chased it.  He was fascinated with history, cars, music, and food…So, turning his kosher deli into a fifties diner wasn’t that odd of a  decision.  If anything, it was the next step.  Having inherited my father’s love of all of the above, I was ecstatic when my parents made the announcement.  My brother, sister, and I even helped my parents lay the black and white tile on the floor, or at least we would like to think so. In truth, we were no more than 8, 6,and 10 years of age, so our level of help was limited.  We were probably in the way, but my mother and father pulled it off with the help of some employees.  In four days, Deerwood Deli & Diner was born, and with it, my father’s dream of cheeseburgers and milkshakes at the lunch counter had become a reality.