Grandma Jay's Rolling Pin

When Grandma Jay made the long bus trip from Ohio to visit us in Wisconsin, she spent much of her time making ravioli, hundreds of ravioli that we put in the freezer out in the garage and broke out for special occasions. We were perhaps one of the few families in Wisconsin—maybe the entire United States—who ate ravioli on Christmas, Easter, and, though less often, on Thanksgiving. This, I now know, was a silent sacrifice on my mother’s part. She preferred the traditional meals, and much preferred making them than thawing and cooking ravioli. She felt it diminished her role as wife and mother. She was a woman of her generation. But, since for my dad, my brother, and me, ravioli was nothing short of a taser jolt to the brain’s reward pathway, she deferred to our less than traditional taste. She loved us.

I watched Grandma Jay make ravioli, standing on a step stool next to her, watching her crack eggs into a crater in the middle of a pile of flour, listening to her sing softly in Italian, admiring the way those practiced hands mixed everything together into a sticky blob placed on a floured cutting board the size of a small kitchen table. Those hands, the felt knowingness in them, the pinch or sprinkle of this, the handful of that, the mounding and kneading. No measuring cups, no measuring spoons. Just the hands. Then out came the rolling pin to flatten the dough, from which circles were cut with a sharp-edged metal cup, which were filled with a manicotti mixture whose composition she refused to reveal, which were, finally, sealed with the tines of a fork. A low-tech operation, to be sure, but the ravioli that emerged from it would have made the most hardened Calvinist smile.

But that rolling pin. When Grandma Jay boarded the bus in Cincinnati, she stowed her luggage but carried that rolling pin. It never left her hand. She held it vertically, one end on the seat, for the entire journey. That rolling pin. Made from a broom handle. Tempered with olive oil. Worn smooth at the ends from the friction of her hands. Progenitor of untold thousands of ravioli. That rolling pin. It was a magic wand she carried to us. That rolling pin. The deft rhetoric of its outward push and inward pull. The rhythm of it, the grace of it, in it. That rolling pin. It spoke the deep grammar of simplicity, skill, and love. That rolling pin. It never left her hand.