Gawoompkies

Former baseball pitcher Don Larsen died last week and I had been thinking about him because my Italian grandmother has recently been placed in a nursing home. She no longer makes her vintage crabcakes, meatballs and sauce, or Gawoompkies, a Polish dish of bolied cabbage wrapped around ground pork. She hasn't cooked for years because of a worsening Alzheimers condition. It's gotten to the point where she can no longer take care of herself. Though she's lost her short term memory, Carolyn can easily recall baseball games from a bygone era like they took place yesterday, including Larsen's perfect game no-hitter in the 1956 World Series.

"I was scrubbing the kitchen floor on my hands and knees with the radio on," she told me. "There were no kids around and your grandfather had left for work. I had the house to myself." They lived in a modest east Baltimore home at the time and my grandfather worked for Bethlehem Steel at Sparrows Point. "It was so exciting," she explained. "With every pitch I'm thinking, when is it going to end? I couldn't take it."

She would continue. "I like that manager the Yankees had. What was his name?" She looked at the ceiling. "Casey Stengel," I remind her. "That's right. He was one of those rugged old guys," she said. I like em like that."

When I was a young boy in her basement beauty shop, she would run in the other room when a tight Orioles game reached the ninth inning, sometimes leaving customers in her barber's chair. "I can't listen," she would say with a wave of the hands.

No one has ever pitched a no-hitter of any kind in post season play since Larsen and no one has come close to matching my grandmother's recipe for meatballs and sauce. Carolyn turns ninety years old next month and her picture, on the cover of my book, from a similar bygone era, is above.