A Mid-Winter Miracle

In my mind’s eye, I can still see the milk bar, our milk bar, which my parents bought because my mother dreamt the milk bar would make us moderately wealthy. But she died too soon for her dream to come true.

There were three rooms above the milk bar. My mother, who was illiterate and could hardly speak any English, ran the shop—that’s what she called the milk bar— with what I now understand to have been a ferocious determination to succeed. In the rooms above the shop, lived my spinster aunt in one room, my older sister in another and my parents and I in the corner room which had two large wooden windows under one of which stood my bed.

Each wall of each room was painted a different shade of blue, green, brown and white, as was the fashion in working class Fitzroy a long, long time ago when its streets were lined by Victorian era workmen’s houses which back then, were the homes of actual working men and women and their children.

I write all this now because when we were out this morning, Rocky and I, not long after we passed the boarded-up shop front of the vandalised eloffice of Josh Burns, I received news in a text message that triggered this recollection of our milk bar and of my mother’s dream and of my life in the rooms above the shop.

The text message may not have triggered this flood of memories had it not been for the fact that last Friday night I heard that our shop―the milk bar ― was now a restaurant, the food apparently so good that it was almost impossible to get a booking any time in the foreseeable future.

I was a few hundred metres away from our shop ―in a room above a bar for a friend’s birthday party― when I was told about the much praised and perhaps even hat-worthy restaurant that had taken its place.

On the way home I was lost in memories of the shop, how it was set out, how my mother looked in her grey shop-keeper coat standing in front of the fridge-counter waiting to do business and my father in the other room, the grocery room with its shelves full of tinned groceries. I remembered my father standing there in front of the barrel of pickled cucumbers that stood near the room’s entrance out of which, each day, he would fish several pickles which he would put in a bowl to be eaten with the chicken soup and boiled chicken which we ate each evening rather late at night after my mother closed the shop.

Those pickled cucumbers made my culinary life bearable. I loved them, the taste of them, salty and dill-flavoured, and garlic-touched and crunchy. Heavenly, and on the way home the smell of them was there with me, the smell of the barrel out of which my father fished them, the smell that cannot be replicated in even the best commercial jars of dill pickled cucumbers—not even close—that smell was alive in me all the way home.

The text message came not long after we had passed the boarded-up shop front of the electoral office of Josh Burns― without planning it, we have walked past it every morning since it was vandalised.

Was this possible I wondered as I read the message? It said that somehow, at this time of the year, in the middle of winter, when only a miracle could explain it, Alan from the fruit shop at the South Melbourne Market had a box of  pickling cucumbers, just one box, that he would save for me if I came immediately because he wasn’t sure he could fend off the demand  from the small army of cucumber picklers who would inevitably soon descend on him.

I set off for the market, though before that, Rocky and I walked along the beach and the winter sun was mellow and it was a still windless morning and I wondered how it was that Alan had a box of pickling cucumbers in the middle of winter because pickling cucumbers are only available in late summer and only for a few weeks at most.

And so it was that I went to South Melbourne Market and went to see Alan, who wasn’t there to explain the miracle, but he had left my box of pickling cucumbers with my name on it and I took off the lid and the cucumbers were hard in my hand and they were the right size and a lovely green and I bought five bunches of dill and four bulbs of garlic and went home.

This is not the place to describe, step by step, how to pickle dill cucumbers which I learnt from my oldest sister but if there is interest in my pickling secrets, I am prepared to share them.

The pickling done, the smell of the dill and the garlic and the salted water in me and on me, I wondered what it would be like to go to the restaurant which had been our shop, eat there in the rooms that had been the milk bar and grocery rooms. I wondered whether the rooms upstairs were part of the restaurant, and whether I could eat up there, in the room where my bed had stood, beneath the large wooden window?

I don’t know whether I will go eat at that rather well-regarded restaurant. Indeed, I think the chances are that I will not eat there. Chances are I won’t even go and have a look at what has become of our milk bar.

But who knows. Strange things happen, like the miraculous mid-winter box of pickling cucumbers that was set aside for me, so that in a week or so, dill pickled cucumbers will be ready, and I don’t know but maybe, when they are ready and the smell of them fills me, I might be persuaded to go to the restaurant.

And perhaps she would be there, my mother in her grey shop-coat behind the fridge-counter and my father there too, standing over the wooden barrel of pickled cucumbers. Perhaps, somehow, we would eat there together, though I doubt that chicken soup and boiled chicken and especially dill pickles from a wooden barrel would be on the menu.