Around and About with Richard McCarthy: Farewell to Mom’s Home Cooking: When a community loses an institution

When I was on vacation a little while back, I read in the local newspaper that a restaurant named Mom’s Home Cooking was closing its doors for good after a quarter-century of operation. The reason the article gave for its closing was that the owners, a married couple who were both 82 years old, had aged-out of the demanding daily energies required to keep it operating.

It wasn’t hard for me to figure out from the article that Mom’s was a local institution. It was open seven days a week for breakfast and lunch, beloved for its comfort food, served in very generous portions. In this time when a lot of pricing reminds one of the phrase “a king’s ransom,” prices at Mom’s were better than reasonable, a “peasant’s ransom,” if you will. A specialty of the house was fresh fruit-filled Belgian waffles.

It is said that Napoleon’s marshals had a standing order from him to “march to the sound of the guns.” For my part, I have somewhere in my journey given myself the standing order to march to and explore the nooks and crannies of life. Therefore it came as no surprise to me that I found myself resolved to eat at Mom’s in its last few days of existence.

When I got there a little after 9 a.m. on a Friday, two days before it was slated to close for the last time, I was shown by a teenage boy (a grandson of the owners?) to one of two open tables.

I looked around at my fellow diners and saw that most of them were at the same stage of life as I am — somewhere between the colors of autumn and the stripped-bare boughs of winter. I had the sense most of the people at other tables were regular or semi-regular customers who knew that Mom’s would soon be but a memory.

The writer Ernest Hemingway had what is called the “iceberg theory of writing.” He believed what is seen on the surface of a written piece should be the tip of the iceberg, with most of the story below the surface, felt but unseen. That is the way Mom’s seemed to me that morning. On the surface people went about a “just like any other day” normality, but I felt what I’ll be so bold as to call a solemnity beneath it. A slice of life that was familiar to folks, and to which they now realized they’d become endeared, was passing away. Given their age, it wasn’t hard for me to imagine Mom’s was joining an ever-longer line of things and people in their life that had left for good, gone to where all that leaves for good goes, or doesn’t go.

My first and last Mom’s breakfast arrived — a Greek omelette. Apparently Mom’s interpretation of “filling” included not only everything that could be fit inside the eggs, but also everything that could be balanced on top, and then some. This bountifulness was in keeping with the waffles I saw other people eating, which were not only filled with fruit, but had enough whipped cream on top to ski on.

As I look back on my omelette and the melt-in-your-mouth homemade biscuit which accompanied it, I can see why anyone who ate at Mom’s could believe that the passing of what it offered, the tangible and the intangible, was worth lamenting.

As I was finishing my food, I did see a dramatic act that was on the surface of things. When one of the diners was leaving, she and my waitress gave each other an anything-but-perfunctory extended hug. I knew there was more truth than poetry to my thought that it was a “goodbye for this lifetime” embrace.

When it was time for me to pay my bill, the 82 year-old woman owner was at the cash register.

Besides being an avid audience member at any human drama (or comedy, for that matter), I am sometimes moved to climb onto the stage to advance the plot. So when I came up to the register, I looked the owner in the eyes and said some heartfelt words. I don’t remember exactly what they were, but they had to do with the worth of a lifetime labor of love.

The owner seemed to take my words very much to heart, perhaps the more so because she didn’t recognize me as a regular customer, and sensed I’d come to pay my respects.

At any rate, she got what I was trying to say, kept eye contact, and said it was hard to let it all go. Her words seemed deeply felt, particularly so because I had the sense that she was someone who usually kept her emotions close to the vest. You don’t operate a restaurant seven days a week for a quarter-century and not be tough, but I could see the tears held in check at the back of her eyes. She told me she was touched by customers giving her goodbye gifts, but could hardly finish the sentence.

We kept eye contact as I backed away from the register, and she said “thank you for your kindness,” not terribly unlike a family member of the deceased might say to a mourner at a wake.

And then I turned around, walked out the door, and left Mom’s Home Cooking behind forever, just as I left my mom’s home cooking behind those many years before.

Amherst resident Richard McCarthy, a longtime columnist at the Springfield Republican, writes a monthly column for the Gazette.