In every savored memory, the kind that rolls through your head in warm colors and sounds, there’s always someone there touching those scenes with grace. And, perhaps, with the scent of a home-cooked stew.
I’m thinking of Porotos Granados, spiked with lots of garlic, sweetened with creamy cubes of butternut squash and simmered with pinto beans, corn, and fresh basil. This humble Chilean bean stew reveals itself in warm wafts of comfort — the sweetness of the corn and squash, the earthy beans and tangy garlic, the sunny breath of basil. It’s the scent of home, stirred by my favorite neighbors.
Mike Andrews and Jana Antos used to lived across the street from me in a lush old neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina. I worked as a newspaper reporter in the city for several years, moving through a few nondescript apartments before I found the sunny, roomy bungalow with the giant wraparound porch on a lush stub of road called Alexander. Mike was a rugged, red-haired Texan who could transform any routine gathering into something noticeably experiential. Jana was an effervescent South Carolinian with bottomless empathy and a beautiful laugh. The day after my roommate and I moved in, they brought us fresh-baked cookies. I was in love.
At first, I thought it wouldn’t work out between us. They were cool, relaxed, quiet and organized. I was jittery, uptight, loud and could never find my keys. We seemed like a match made in therapy, with me as the patient.
Yet they turned out to be the dream neighbors from a sun-dappled fantasy I had harbored since childhood, when my Greek immigrant family struggled to fit into the Lutheran quiet of small-town North Dakota. Mike mowed my backyard weeds. Jana sweet-talked my spooked cat when he tried to run away. They introduced me to their friends and invited me to their backyard barbecues, Thanksgiving dinners and Outer Bank vacations. After disastrous dates, when Jana would see me crying in my car, she would rap on the window and ask me in for a glass of wine. On warm weekend mornings, when I drank my coffee on the front porch and they worked in their blooming yard, we waved hello and shouted greetings to each other. Mike and Jana were so well-suited for each other, so energized with the easy joy that signals true happiness, that it made me, a hapless romantic, almost jealous. Almost. As tangible proof that love will always attract love, they filled my lonely heart with hope.
Which brings me to the Porotos Granados. A staple of Chile’s Indians, this vegetarian stew isn’t old Carolina diner fare. It’s the kind of simple and filling meal I imagined a pre-Che Ernesto Guevara eating on his ‘Motorcycle Diaries’ travels. Mike made the stew one blustery winter afternoon when I was home sick with the flu. I was still in my pajamas when Jana knocked on the door, holding a warm Tupperware container and a slice of just-baked cornbread the size of a paperback novel. “Mike saw your car when he came back from work and thought maybe you’re weren’t feeling well,” she said.
This was just like Mike and Jana, trying to cheer up an under-the-weather friend with some home-cooked comfort food. But what was so extraordinary about this gesture was that at the time Mike himself was the one who was sick - very sick. A year before, he had been diagnosed with ALS, a neurodegenerative disease that eventually atrophies the entire body. Those with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, remain very sound of mind but trapped in their frozen bodies. Mike was still working and driving and cooking, but his speech was slurred and his handsome face was creased with worry.
He had first noticed problems the previous autumn, in 2002, when a group of us went on a camping trip to the Outer Banks isle of Cape Lookout. We had slept in sand-blown tents, roasted fresh-caught fish, read ghost stories out of a cheesy book and sung drunken renditions of “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac.
Mike cracked everyone up, always spotting the hilarious in the mundane. He was tireless - hiking, fishing, kayaking and listening to our increasingly convoluted ghost stories. I remember watching him and Jana walking hand-in-hand along the darkened beach, blessed by the smoky moonlight.
But Mike was also garbling words, something he never did. Was it the beers? Goodness knows we had indulged, leaving one tall Carolina lawyer-cowboy in our group in such a state that he spent half of the night howling a Skynyrd-tinged version of Kiss’s “Beth” into the star-studded sky. But weeks later, Mike’s slurring was still there.
After months of tests, he and Jana got the terrible news.
Mike fought hard, undergoing experimental therapies and taking an intense combination of medication. He and Jana got married on the beach in Ocracoke, an island where they had spent some of their happiest times together. They stayed close to their friends, even as Mike grew weaker. By the time I left Raleigh in 2004, Mike was in a wheelchair. When I returned a year later for a visit, he used a feeding tube and could no longer talk.
We communicated through a special computer program he used to type out his thoughts, which included the serious (his environmental advocacy work for the Sierra Club) and the hilarious (his daughter’s then-boyfriend, who drew facial hair on images of power tools as “statements of art”). When I returned again in 2006, he struggled to hold up his head. I was crushed when I saw him and I talked too fast, too much, in the avalanched speech of a person who cannot say goodbye.
“We miss you,” he wrote on the computer screen. “Come back home.”
He died last year, on January 19. He was 45 years old.
I live far away now, in Athens, Greece, and I haven’t been back to Raleigh since Mike passed away. But I think about him and Jana often, savoring the memories and thanking fate for introducing me to the best neighbors a girl could have.
I still use Mike’s recipe for Porotos Granados. Jana wrote it down for me on an index card the day after I wolfed down the four delicious servings in the Tupperware. The tender beans, sweet corn and smooth squash, the garlic and basil, all sopped up with corn bread — it tasted like a loving cup of home that cold day in North Carolina.
The winters are milder in Greece, but when the butternut squash at the vegetable market looks ripe, I know it’s time for a big pot of Mike’s stew. As it simmers, the scents take me back to Alexander Road, and my heart tightens with longing. I can hear Mike and Jana laughing on my porch. If I close my eyes, I almost feel like I’m home again.
