My last conversation with Sarah was an intimate chat last year in the midst of revelry. We sat at the end of a long Christmas Eve table crowded with food and family, good cheer and laughter. It was as though she and I were alone in a raindrop.
Sarah was dying, had been for more than a year, and knew it. We didn’t mention cancer because we didn’t have to. It sat with us. Her mood was not one of resignation but the softer side of the coin, acceptance. Her demeanor reminded me of something she’d said years ago, a philosophy forged at a young age: “You get what you get.”
Her mother, Donna Alvarez Mislak, and I are first cousins, more like brother and sister. Our fathers – Manuel Alvarez and Victor Alvarez – were brothers in old Highlandtown. It was in the fabled neighborhood of immigrants that our Christmas Eve fête began during the Depression.
It moved to my parents’ home in Linthicum the year my grandmother died and Jimmy Carter was elected. For the past 20 years my brother Danny and his wife Renee have opened their home on December 24. Dan does most of the cooking.
Our family honors tradition, particularly in regard to food. As my parents began to slow down after decades of steaming crabs, canning tomatoes and turning heavy irons to make Italian pizzelle cookies the old-fashioned way, my father noted that “tradition is nothing but work …”
Sarah knew it well, having long ago commandeered her mother’s stove to prepare big holiday meals, feeding two dozen guests lasagna on Palm Sunday and turkey with more trimmings than a Norman Rockwell painting on Thanksgiving.
Said Donna: “When you asked if you could help with anything when she was cooking she’d say, ‘Stay out of my kitchen until it’s time to do the dishes.’”
In the past year it took considerable effort for her to attend gatherings of the extended family yet she managed it with quiet dignity.
Should old acquaintance be forgot?
Not no way, not no how.
Sarah sipped wine and I enjoyed a plate of my son’s paella as nostalgia took us back to the rowhouse on Macon Street where the family got its start; a home each of us knew from birth, the one from which I write this now.
Built in 1920, it sports a signature adornment. If you only visited once you’d remember it: an interior wall that begins at the vestibule and runs up the stairs to the bathroom. From the chair rail down it is covered with some sort of linoleum, a deco expanse of ivy and trellis against a field of cream.
I invited Sarah to see the house again, perhaps run her hand over the wall and peek into the backyard where her mother and I once toddled with Easter baskets bigger than we were. And then we’d walk around the corner with her folks to dine on dolmades and calamari and spanikopita at Samos, a family favorite.
Let’s do it, we agreed. Sooner than later.
Sarah Elizabeth Mislak Gentry lived to see one more Easter and this year’s Opening Day. She joined her family on a trip to Rome and, though too weak to make it to the beach, was able to visit Ocean City, her happy place, this summer. But not a last visit to Macon Street. She died at her parents’ home in Freeland on July 28, age 46.
Last Halloween she and her husband Mike Gentry dressed up as Wayne and Garth, with Sarah playing the Dana Carvey role. A beauty all her life, if Sarah Mislak was a president, Garth would surely say, “She’d be Babe-bra-ham Lincoln.”
She graduated in 1996 from Mercy High School, where a scholarship has been established in her memory. For a decade – 2010 to 2020 – she and Mike owned Freddie’s Ale House (formerly Dead Freddie’s) on Harford Road.
“It was Sarah’s idea to buy the bar; she’d already been working there,” said Mike, a liquor distributor. Their son Benjamin (Archbishop Curley, class of 2017) was in grade school at the time and owning the saloon allowed them to make their own schedule to attend his school events and ballgames.
Sarah and Mike met when she was studying art history at Towson University. They caught each other’s eye in 1997 at her father’s road salt business in Curtis Bay, dyeing and packaging boxes of salt for delivery.
“It was night work in the back of a chemical plant,” said David Mislak. “It took eight of us to do about 100 tons a night.”
Ben arrived in 1999 and Sarah’s interests turned inward, toward home. Her guiding light was Donna’s mother, the former Claire Wiegmann, whom she called Nan. Nan taught her to cross-stitch, one of several crafts at which she excelled, including turning blue crab shells into Christmas ornaments.
“The back of Sarah’s cross stitch was clean, no loose threads,” said Donna. “She and my mother cooked together and watched soap operas like General Hospital. My mom played dress-up with her – girly stuff.” Claire died in August of 2022, a month before Sarah was diagnosed with multiple cancers.
Donna’s parents lived in Cambridge on the Eastern Shore and were regulars at the local American Legion Post. Sarah and her younger brother J.D. spent a lot of time with their grandparents and tagged along.
It was while eulogizing his sister at a St. Casimir memorial Mass that J.D. revealed an old family mystery. The siblings were quite young, Donna and Dave were working and the babysitter wasn’t paying attention. When Donna picked up the kids after work the babysitter unloaded on her: Your kids covered my bathroom walls with lipstick and talcum powder. J.D. took the rap. There may have been a spanking involved.
“Thirty years later,” he said from the pulpit, “Sarah confessed. It was her.”
He finished by saying, “If you want to remember Sarah, reach out to a family member you haven’t talked to in awhile.”
At the reception, Mike spoke briefly, saying that Sarah always told him he talked too long and said ridiculous things. Sarah was the opposite, reserved to the point of appearing stand-offish.
“She didn’t engage with a lot of people, but when she did, she engaged deeply,” said Mike, remembering her voice—still the somewhat whimsical one she had as a girl—and high-pitched laugh that broke into a giggle.
“You knew she was a light, a light you wanted to be near,” said Corinne Harrison, her best friend.
My brother Dan followed Mike’s remarks. He shared Sarah’s passion for cooking (more so the joy of feeding loved ones) and each year spent a few weeks down the ocean with the Mislaks. Dan noted the way she created meals, her presentation—”like something out of a magazine”—and her wit.
“When she did have something to say it cut through all the nonsense and got to the heart of whatever we were talking about,” he said. “When she smiled it was just a little crooked, like she knew something we didn’t.”
Before the long day ended, I asked Donna if they were going to have Thanksgiving this year as they’ve done since the page turned on the last generation. The answer was unequivocal.
What should we bring?
“Nothing,” she said. “When Sarah cooked she just wanted everyone to show up.”
Rafael Alvarez is on the road to the Mississippi Delta where he will file stories on the blues. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com
