Ginnie
I was scared when I found out that I'd be rooming with her for the next four months. She was a solid lady in her fifties, six feet tall, a crown of white hair on a head sporting dangly, colorful earrings - a miniature blackboard and apple - befitting of a school teacher. And that she was, this woman who shared the same name with my cousin who snuck out from her parents' home to late night parties. Ginnie.
When we first navigated to our new homes, in an England with rustic, crumbly and unfamiliar homes, she bore her three bursting luggage bags with a soldier's resolution. Despite the hefty hundred pounds she must have been carrying, she still had time to comment on my lack of superior luggage materials. "We've learned to bring luggage with wheels next time, haven't we?" I wasn't sure whether to take her in a light ‘ha ha’ jest or severe sarcasm. I did my best to stay out of her way for the next few days.
Our household was invited to several parties, and it was then that I first witnessed Ginnie’s mystical cooking skills. There was only flour, sugar, eggs, milk, some raisins and oatmeal, but out of those bare ingredients she made the tastiest cookies and cakes. How tasty were they? Well, a batch of forty cookies never lasted longer than half a day between three roommates. Oatmeal raisin cookies that good could not possibly have come from an evil lady, so I sat in the kitchen with her while she kneaded dough for pumpkin bread. Another surprise: she was a volunteer girl scout leader.
Ginnie once went into a hot forest with her giggling little charges and their accompanying parents, all of them prepared to do some Julia Child-style cooking in an Amazonian environment. The trail was a bit muddy from the intense thunderstorm the day before, so the parents did their best to avoid the puddles lest they stained their Calvin Klein slacks and Jones New York skirts. One of the girls took to leaping directly into the puddles. The father got on the little girl’s case right away, but the kid with a predilection for mud appealed to Ginnie for final justification. “Is it okay to jump in puddles, Mrs. Fink?” Ginnie didn’t offer immediate verdict. Instead, she sat on a log, bent over to undo her laces, took off her shoes, and finally her socks. “If your feet want mud puddles, then give them mud puddles!” Mrs. Fink, staring all the while at the persecuting father, proceeded to stick her neatly trimmed toes into a juicy mud puddle, and the toes likewise responded by wriggling in delight.
Twelve cleaned feet later, the scout group came upon a grassy clearing. Cooking time began, and a different parent took out a Bic lighter to do the deed. Ginnie came down on him, hard. “No no no! This is girl scouts!” She took out small planks of wood and aluminum foil from her backpack and began building a makeshift oven. Even the oven ‘door’ was coated with aluminum, a respectful nod toward precision and solar energy. That done, she began teaching the girls how to prepare dough that was just right, out of the same materials that she used for her hot, soft and flaky buttermilk biscuits, and soon the rickety albeit very functional aluminum-wood oven was in operation. After about thirty minutes of storytelling, the girl scout biscuits were done, and delighted parents thanked god that their girls could cook well in today’s climate of extreme feminism.
I saw the same fervour in the smallest hours of the day when she gave me competition in all-nighter study-sessions. Just as my other roommate had hip hop humming through his door and I had my acid music creeping outside my room, Ginnie had haunting classical concertos flowing down the narrow stairs. One evening, after a violent bout of studying Elizabethan poetry by Sir Philip Sydney, John Donne’s other horny contemporary, Ginnie said yes to a night in the pubs with her two roommates.
We decided on an Irish pub and I had my cider, Darryl had his Bacardi, and Ginnie had her Jamison’s whisky, straight – no ice or mixers in between. She downed two or three fairly quickly, but to her credit she stood her ground with some support from my shoulder. We stayed and chatted until somewhere around 1 AM, when last calls were ordered, and we decided that home was the best place for three inebriated people who had no idea where they were in a foreign country. Ginnie and I walked behind Darryl with a slight wobble in our steps, and we sobered enough to appreciate the cool night and clear crescent moon. “How beautiful,” I fawned, to which Ginnie replied “It’s the moon, it’s been there for several hundred years and it’s gonna be there for several hundred more.” Maybe it was the Jamison’s, or maybe it was the recent chat of stories about her younger days, but Ginnie began singing “Danny Boy,” an Irish tune, and I was compelled to hook my arm through hers and skip home for the rest of the night
