"Tula was feeling fine until Thursday morning. She was on her way to church to dye eggs for the midnight Easter service. Never made it, though. Died instantly. Poor Tula."

"How did she die?" I ask.

"Oh, they found it right away. When they opened her up, it was right there. A tumor the size of a grapefruit. You get to be my age and these things happen all the time," she says, handing me a spoon.

I look down at the pink grapefruit on my plate and remember Tula.

"Oh, that's nothing, though. I'll tell you about Maria. Oh, Maria left this world in a hurry." Nouna shakes her head in disbelief. "She was napping on her new couch, and all of a sudden, she has a sharp pain in her side. Your cousin Elena looks over from watching Love Boat and says, 'You OK, Maria?' Maria points to her side. 'This hurts over here. I never felt such a pain over here.' Next thing you know, boom! Maria's gone."

I roll my eyes. "That's horrible."

"Horrible? You think that's horrible? Listen, she had an aneurysm as big as a kalamata olive. The doctor found it during the autopsy. She didn't have a chance. He also found a tumor on her pancreas. Yep, a tumor the size of ... "-I wince as Nouna searches for the word-"a blood orange."

My grandmother loves to tell stories, especially during breakfast. Throughout my childhood summers in Minnesota she enlightened me with tales of death and disease that somehow always related to the food we ate. For every meal I've shared with Nouna, for every friend and relative, there's a story.

Nouna's friend Merope is always stopping by to drop off her apple baklava. Before she'll surrender her buttery dessert-the kind that gave "poor Peter Aliopoulis heart disease"-she demands a tale. Nouna always complies, although I don't know why, since no one eats Merope's baklava anyway. Apparently it ruined the singing career of Nouna's friend, Helen Spiloptohos, who permanently lost her voice when a triangular slice dripping with sticky syrup became lodged in her throat. "Took an hour to get it out and by then there was scar tissue running down her esophagus like a strip of bacon."

Nouna and I sometimes take a walk. At Lake Calhoun we avoid the bike path so we don't end up "flattened like gyros" by some reckless skater. Apparently Aphrodite Rombakis crossed the bike path last summer to get a drink of water, and a man on skates ran into her. She died instantly. No one knows why for sure, but Nouna laments the tragedy.

"No more Aphrodite. No more creamy pastitsio after vesper service. She was killed in an instant and flattened like phyllo for no good reason."

On Saturdays in July, Nouna and I walk to Lake Harriet to listen to outdoor concerts. Nouna always buys me a box of salty popcorn, the kind DeDe Davolis choked to death on in 1983, and we listen to the music from a ways back. There was a time when we sat closer to all the action, until Nouna's nephew Christo lost his hearing. Apparently Christo was trying to rush to the stage to get a free bumper sticker. In his earnest attempt he accidentally knocked over a very large, drunk, belligerent biker, who was in no mood to be bothered. In less than three minutes Christo had a black eye, a broken arm, and an extra-spicy hot wing lodged in his ear. "Never been the same since," Nouna claims. "He's deaf in one ear and abnormally terrified of chicken."

Spend time with Nouna and you'll hear all about our family history. She'll tell you about her grocery business on Hennepin and Lake; the loyal customers and friends who shopped there over the years; the recipes they shared; and then, of course, you'll hear of the chest pains, food poisonings, flatulence, and freak accidents. Your eyes will widen as Nouna describes a fruit bowl of medical phenomena.

Of course, over the years the fruit- and vegetable-sized tumors have become a jumble to me. Was it Helen who choked on a gyros sandwich at the Greek festival? Did Eddie have the brain tumor the size of a ripe avocado, or was he flattened like a potato pancake after bungee jumping on his 50th birthday? Didn't Elaine get run over by the trolley at Lake Harriet station, or was she the one who choked to death on a reuben sandwich at the Lincoln Del? Did someone really have a bump the size of a garbanzo bean under his eye? Which cousin went to the Taste of Chicago, ate his first Polish sausage, blew up like a cherry tomato, and dropped dead from an allergic reaction to sauerkraut?

I've forgotten all the names. But the association of food with doom haunts my memory, and the produce department at any supermarket evokes a thousand tragic deaths. MM

Erika Erhart lives in Chicago.
 

This article appeared as "A Fruitful Death" in the February, 1998 issue of Minnesota Monthly. Copyright Minnesota Monthly.