When you bring fricasé de pollo to a simmer, the smell is good enough and strong enough to stop you in your tracks.

Family reunions are always centered heavily around food. Maybe it's residues of the hunter-gatherer instinct — food is a good excuse to get people together in pretty much any culture.

When I smell tomato sauce cooking I always think of family reunions and of the mind-boggling profundity of young children.

Before she emigrated to the United States, my grandmother half-completed a program of psychology and English at the University of Havana. Even today, the educational system there is excellent. One hears stories of students enacting reaction after chemical reaction with crude lab tools in order to derive the basic substances needed for a proper experiment. Need salt, evaporate sea water. Get calcium from sea shells. I don't know how much of it is true, but the testimony speaks to the preciousness of knowledge in places where everything else is lost.

My grandmother studied there before the revolution, so university resources were much better. Whenever we had family reunions she would sit the young children (including myself) together and tell them about the few courses she completed. To her it was an exercise in illustrating the importance of education; by speaking about the most interesting things she encountered she hoped to rouse us from our skateboards and video games and get us studying. Eventually her stories would find their logical conclusion in one Spring morning when her psychology professor procured a human brain floating in a jar with preservative.

By the time I was a teenager, I'd heard this story enough times to have memorized it and be bored by it. The last time I heard the story — the year before my grandmother started to get really sick — she and I were sitting at a rough-wood picnic table in an aunt's backyard with my younger cousin, a little girl who looked to be in early grade school. In my family the term 'cousin' is used liberally, so for all I know she was some long-removed little relative of some old friend of the family proper. I don't remember her name.

That day, my grandmother told us about how some of the students promptly stood and left the room when they saw the brain, and how others sat transfixed, while others slid from their seats to get a closer look. Her professor had explained calmly that the brain was a loan from the biology department and had belonged to a woman in her late forties, that it was not stricken with disease, that the students who had remained were looking at a brain much like the ones contained in their own —

"Could she still think?" my cousin asked.

My grandmother was caught off-guard.

"What?"

"Could she still think? Did she know that people were looking at her brain?"

At this point any good empiricist would dumb-down the relationship between oxygen and the human brain, perhaps expounding a little on the destructive effects of preservative chemicals on the precious connections between the billions of tiny neurons to illustrate that no indeed the woman could not any longer think.

Instead, my grandmother smiled a little and shook her head No.

"Oh," my cousin said, satisfied.

I did not understand until years later that my grandmother must have been bitter about her own missed education.

She spent the rest of the day smiling.