My grandma Zabelle was my dad’s paternal aunt. But with his mother’s passing when he was only seven, Zabelle had as good as raised my dad as one of her own. And since I had no surviving grandparents, Zabelle was the one grandma that I knew.
In the late 1980’s she was already a tiny old lady. She wore long sleeve black blouses and a black scarf wrapped around her wispy white hair; even in the heat of August, even while cooking, with all four burners of her stove turned on in the kitchen. Zabelle was stern: I’d get a scolding for trying to sneak my fingers into the bowl of frosting she’d just whipped (I was a famous cake batter and frosting thief). But the woman was all love, her eyes crinkled with laughter all the while she was scolding me. She’d chase me with a wooden spoon under the kitchen table and tell me that if I sat there quietly, she’d let me lick the bowl once she was done frosting the cake.
Zabelle was a proud Vanetsi: her family had been displaced from Van in Western Armenia (now Turkey) in 1915, during the Armenian Genocide. But in Armenian culture Vanetsi people are known and often teased for their frugality (if not outright parsimony). And boy, was Zabelle a Vanetsi in that sense! A survivor of two world wars, 1 genocide, 4 different governments, and a number of more personal privations, she was nothing if not frugal. She was known to unravel old, worn out sweaters, and knit new ones out of the yarn. All the dish sponges in her kitchen had once been nylon pantyhose (don’t question it). And I still love Zabelle’s meat pies because she’d always mix rice in with the meat – years later it dawned on me that she used to do that to stretch whatever little meat she happened to have.
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