The Search For Sy Ginsburg

When our kids were little and wanted to play a board game, I could have it over and done in fifteen minutes. Chutes and Ladders? When they weren’t looking I’d move my piece to the start so they would always win and then I’d say incredulously, “Oh my goodness, you beat me again? How is it that you’re so good at this game and I’m so bad?”

Mark, on the other hand, could play any game forever. It would usually end when the kids were mad and crying and stomped off to their room because they lost. “Why do you do that,” I’d ask him, “just let them win and then you’re done with your parental duties in record time and can move on to something else.” He was shocked at the suggestion. “Let them win??!!! What is that supposed to teach them? That’s ridiculous. I can’t believe you actually do that,” he said. “I do,” I answered back, “because I’ve got twenty other things to do besides trying to beat an eight year old in a board game.” What Mark saw as opportunity for character building was time management for me, and since it was now confirmed that his wife was a slacker he had his work cut out for him.

This nature of his would rear its head often. When Maggie came home from 1st grade with instructions on making a bug with the family, the sky apparently was the limit. We were new to the area, new to the school, and long over group projects thank-you-very-much. When I skimmed the directions I thought this was something the kid actually made with input from their parents, and so on the 12 x 18 piece of construction paper Maggie was sent home with, we helped her to correctly draw the head, body, and thorax with pencil and then let her let loose with crayons. On Open House Night that spring, the bug projects were displayed on tables in the hallway and the Fisher Family contribution looked like it was made by drunk baboons. There were 3-D bugs, clay bugs mounted on construction paper covered in actual dirt, play-doh bugs, and my personal favorite, the bug made with real mink because that kid’s mom owned a fur shop.

I was mortified, Mark was livid. “You didn’t tell me the bugs were supposed to look like this,” he said. “Look at ours. It’s the worst bug on the table. We look like a bunch of amateurs.” There was no doubt that the Fisher Family Bug Project was a massive fail by an apparently uninvolved family, which in that school was the equivalent of being drug-addled, teeth missing, carnies living in an van down by the river. “I didn’t know,” I said. “Do you think I’d have let this mess leave the house if I knew there was going to be a mink beetle sitting next to it?” We left our first Open House Night in shame as the teacher yelled after us, “Don’t forget to take your bug project home!!”, which we took to mean TAKE YOUR TRASH BACK TO THE VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER.

By the time the third Fisher kid participated in the bug project, Mark had taken over. He decided that this one would be made of paper mache and he was down in the basement night after night, toiling away like Geppetto carving Pinocchio. I’d yell down that it was getting late and maybe he should come to bed, but under a single, dim light at his workbench he’d add another layer of paper dipped in glue and shape and mold and talk to himself like a prisoner in solitary. By the time it was done, he had to carry it into school because it was too heavy for our little Mallory. At that year’s spring open house, the Fisher bug wasn’t the worst but it wasn’t in the top ten either. That year was the dawn of the Swavorski crystals, and as Mark looked the other bugs over on the table in the hallway, he let out a deep sigh and whispered to me, “Who are these MFers putting crystals on bugs? Have you ever seen a goddamned crystal on a bug? NO. And you know why? Because bugs blend into their environment. They don’t draw attention to themselves.” I patted him on the back. I told him that he did a good job and we were so proud of him, that when we got home he was going to get an extra big bowl of ice cream before he went to bed because he was OUR FAVORITE BUG MAKER. Mark muttered to himself and waited for Mal’s teacher to be free so he could ask her if accuracy was no longer relevant in replicating bugs. I followed behind doing clean up in aisle storytime and said to her, “I’m sorry, he’s really tired. He’s been putting in a lot of late nights.”

The boy child would become Mark’s next priority when he got into Cub Scouts and the Pinewood Derby. Will came home with the kit and he and his dad talked it over. Will didn’t see the urgency in this car-making business like Mark did, and so he bailed pretty quick on the project. Mark, though, talked physics with everybody at the med center. He went from department to department to get the lowdown on the science and the secret to a winning Pinewood Derby car. “The weight goes in the back, Kath,” he said to me, “but you have to get it just right,” and like the bug project he’d be down in the basement tinkering away at it. Will would go down there now and then but he pretty much wasn’t interested in it, or maybe he’d seen that look in his dad’s eyes before. When Mark felt like he’d gotten the speed as perfect as possible he turned it over to Will to paint. It was by far the most butt ugly Pinewood Derby car ever but they took off to the races that Saturday morning. Twice I drove over to the competition to see how things were going and that ugly car kept winning and winning and they would place 2nd in the district. “How about that, buddy,” Mark said to Will. “You’d have done this with your mom and you know what you’d end up with? One of those participation ribbons which is what losers get.”

In high school, the kids did track and cross country and competitive dance competitions and Mark was there for all of it. Yelling from the bleachers, he’d beam when they’d push themselves and pump his fist when they placed. At the end of every 4×400 that Maggie ran, we’d watch from the stands as she hurled into a trash can afterwards. “That’s a good sign,” Mark would say to me, “that means she put it all out there.” He stayed competitive in everything with himself and his offspring, but once the kids grew up and left the house he had only the Mrs. by his side. The Mrs. he married who happened to be the least competitive person on the planet, and was the ball and chain to his ambitious drive.

A few years ago, on the weekend before St. Patrick’s Day, I told Mark I needed to go to Costco to get corned beef, specifically Sy Ginsburg corned beef which was the best you could buy. Mark loved Costco because he loved bulk. His first experiment in gardening was pumpkins, and he ended the season with 67 which was 64 more than we needed. We got in the car and drove downtown, and there in the refrigerated case where Sy was located every year, was an empty hole. There was not a single piece to be had, there wasn’t a label or sign where he should have been, there was nothing and we stood aghast as if one of our kids had been kidnapped. Mark took off for a different meat case where he was sure it had been moved. I found a butcher who told me, “Oh yeah, that’s gone. If you wanted Ginsburg corned beef you should have been here weeks ago. That stuff flies out of here.” Dejected, I looked for Mark who was cruising every sample table in the place and loading our cart with everything he taste tested. When I finally found him I told him we had a big problem because Sy was gone. “Gone???!!! Let’s go then. This isn’t the only Costco in town,” he said, and $200 later we loaded the trunk with everything we didn’t need and jumped on the highway to another zip code.

At that Costco they were sampling shepherd’s pie. “Step right up. Get yuuuuuuur shephard’s pie,” the taste tester yelled over and over. “Everything you need in a single dish. Perfect for St. Patrick’s Day. $17.99. Won’t last long. Get yuuuuuuur shephard’s pie.” While I was on the hunt for Sy Ginsburg, Mark was hanging around Shepherd Pie Man, getting sample after sample. “Out of luck,” I told him and he said maybe we should consider shepherd’s pie and I looked at him like he was crazy. “Are you kidding me? That’s not what me or my family have ever done for St. Patrick’s Day. We do corned beef and cabbage. Nobody does shepherd’s pie. It’s not even a pie. It’s got meat in it. It’s disgusting.” “Well, I disagree,” Mark said, “but if you want corned beef then you need to look at me. We are going to get in the car and GO TO THE LAST COSTCO, and when we get there we are going to run through the parking lot. We’re going to split up and head to the deli case on a reconn mission, and YOU ARE NOT GOING TO STOP AND LOOK AT THE BOOKS. If we are going to get some corned beef then you need to bring your “A” game. Are you with me?” I swallowed that Kool-Aid that Reverend Mark was hawking, yelled a mighty AMEN ALLELUIA PRAISE JESUS, and knew that this was what this man was born to do.

This would be such a great story if after several hours and three Costco’s we finally found Sy Ginsburg, but this one doesn’t have that kind of ending. The last Costco was sold out as well and they have never carried it since. On the way home we stopped at the grocery store and got a couple of pieces of corned beef, I cooked it the next day, and it was good but it wasn’t Sy good.

“You should have seen Mom,” Mark told the kids over dinner the next day. “We went everywhere looking for corned beef like we were big game hunters and your mom did not disappoint. It took her awhile but she got into it and I actually saw her running. Have any of you guys ever seen that? No, because it never happens. She got a taste of victory and I might have turned her into a competitor.”

This, of course, was not true but watching Mark in action whenever he was in hot pursuit was a sight to behold. This year I went to one grocery store and didn’t marathon shop like Mark and I had done that Saturday years before. Three hours later in a pot on low boil and then an hour in the oven, I pulled our St. Patrick’s Day meal out and thought of Mark hovering over me to see how it turned out, how he cut it and sampled half of it in the interest of quality control, how I’d yell at him to stop eating it, and how he said he couldn’t help it because it was so good. There are so many times when I am transported to the past where I’d like to stay with such sweet memories, but then the smell of corned beef drifts through the house waiting for the kids to come over, and I am abruptly pulled back into reality and longing for that lucky charm of mine who one day just disappeared.