Potato Chips

Carmelene Melanie Siani

50plus Magazine

ONE EARLY MORNING in Philadelphia when I was about 4 years old, I was standing on the curb watching as my father packed up the car.

“Look at that DeSoto, Clara,” he’d said. “It looks like it was made to go to California.”

My dad had sold all our furniture, but my mother insisted that he was not going to sell her kitchen stuff. 

“It’s coming with us,” she’d announced. Then they’d said some loud things to each other in Italian, but my mother must have ended up being the loudest because there I stood watching as my father tried to fit all her kitchen stuff into the car.

Every now and then my mother would call me into the house and hand me something else to bring out to him.

The car looked completely full to me. My father had filled the glove box, the space under the front seats, and the package tray behind the rear seat. He even filled up the backseat floor, then laid blankets over the mess to even it out.

“You and your sister can play there,” he said as I frowned at the lumpy spot he was pointing to.

I’d been watching him pack all morning. He’d take each item, hold it in his hands, turn it over, look at it for size and shape, move a few things and then slip whatever he had in his hands into a tiny space that didn’t look like it could hold one more item. He had a proud look on his face like he was accomplishing something nobody thought he could. Watching him, I felt proud of him too, as if there wasn’t a single problem he couldn’t solve.

Finally, he put his hand on top of the open trunk lid, and with a big, satisfied grin, told me to go tell my mother that he’d gotten it all in.

I found her sweeping the kitchen floor.

“Daddy says to tell you he got it all in.”

She turned around behind her and handed me a big bag of potato chips.

“Tell him it’s the last thing,” she said.

“Here, Daddy. Mother told me this was the last thing.”

He took the bag of potato chips from me and, measuring it with his eyes, looked at its size and shape, and then looked inside the trunk and back again.

After a second, he tore a small corner off the bag. Then, carefully balancing it on the open palm of one hand, he slowly smashed his other hand right down on top of the bag. He smashed his hands together again and again, and every time he did, the bag of potato chips got smaller.

When he stopped, he looked down at me on the curb, that big grin on his face again.

“I bet your mother thought I wouldn’t fit it in,” he said. “But don’t ever forget, daughter, that’s the nice thing about potato chips: they fit anywhere.”

Carmelene Melanie Siani’s widely published stories on family, caregiving, grief, late-life love and more aim to help others see how life constantly opens to reveal lessons. Visit www.facebook.com/StoryBelly