03/08/09

Samples

A Dinner in 1958 

          It was a nice clear warm June morning when my mother’s brother Jake and his family of ten showed up on our doorstep in the small town of Freeport, Minnesota.  It was mid week and we very seldom had visitors, but when we did they usually showed up on weekends.  Jake was kind of the oddball of the family.  All of my mom’s other brothers were farmers, but Jake worked at a plant in St. Cloud, a city about thirty miles from Freeport, that manufactured freezers. He had tried his hand at farming, and failed. Good old Jake was much more interested in producing children than raising crops that a man or animal could eat.  He and his large family still lived on the farm, which is about forty miles north of St. Cloud and about sixty miles from us. He rented the land out to one of his brothers who lived nearby.

   Jake was a big man as were most of my mom’s brothers. In addition to keeping his wife pregnant he loved to eat, especially if the food was free.  When Jake and his brood arrived he told mom that he had decided he needed to take a vacation. He said he wanted to relax, visit some of his relatives and get away from the stress of his job at the freezer factory.  One thing my Uncle Jake wasn’t going to die of was job stress.  His really difficult job at the factory was to put the little metal serial number tags on the freezers.  How tough could that be? All he had to do was figure out if the label was right side up or not and stick it on the freezer. He told mom he has a hard time keeping up with the production at times because the freezers came off the line at the rapid rate of about one every five minutes. For this stressful work some damn fool paid him enough to support a family of almost a dozen.

    Well, on this fine day he was gracing us with his presence.  His arrival an hour before lunch indicated to mom the need to cook what would normally be a Sunday sized dinner in the middle of the week.  My folks didn’t own a freezer so we never had very much meat on hand and certainly not enough to feed his family of ten and our family of four.  We did have a large garden so we always had fresh or canned vegetables and mom baked a lot so we always had bread and desserts, so that part of making a large meal wasn’t a problem. 

     While my brother Allan was sent to get my dad off of a nearby neighbor’s roof he was shingling, I was dispatched to the Dairyland Super Market right across the alley from our house to get fourteen pork chops.

    We had a charge account at Dairyland so that wasn’t a problem.  I asked Clarence the butcher for fourteen pork chops and he grabbed a hunk of meat out of the cooler and with his big meat cutting saw cut me the requested chops.  I really liked pork chops so I thought the day was going to be fine with me.  More often than not we’d have soup and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch.

     When I arrived home with the pork chops that had been neatly wrapped in white freezer paper, Mom and my Aunt Evelyn, that’s Jake’s wife, already had pots of potatoes and vegetables cooking on the stove.  The added sizzle of pork chops frying in a pan were music, no not just music, more like Mozart to my stomach. As this wonderful melody radiated from the kitchen one of my girl cousins and I set the table.

      There is a strange thing that my mother’s family does when it comes to eating.  The man of the house will sit at the head of the table and is first in line for food. Then everyone is seated by age the rest of the way around the table with the guest family served first.  With this system I was dead last in the line for food.  I ended up right next to dad but the food would be passed the other direction around the table.

     While the yummy looking and steaming hot pork chops, mashed potatoes, gravy, carrots and corn were getting cold, all of us being good Catholics, had to say grace.  Catholic prayers are often times unnecessarily long and when a person is salivating in anticipation of the sweet flavor of a juicy pork chop, grace before meals fit right at the high end of the long category.

     Finally, food on platters and in bowls started the slow trip around the table to it’s final destination; me. By the time the platter holding the pork chops got as far as my place at the table there was only this little scrap of meat that looked like a pork chop only in miniature, that one ended up being mine.  I also got a spoon or two of mashed potatoes, half a slice of bread and some corn.  The carrots, gravy and butter were long gone by the time their empty containers reached me.

     Just as I was starting to eat my dinky meal my Uncle Jake, who was sitting directly across the table from me and had gobbled down his food, reached over the table and speared my pork chop with his fork and said, “You don’t want that pork chop, do you?”  My reaction was swift and must have been improper.  I said, “Yes I do!” and stabbed my wonderful Uncle Jake in the back of the hand with my fork.  As tiny red pearls of his blood appeared around the tines of my fork, the swift arrival of an unseen hand or fist instantly transported me to a distant part of our galaxy. I was seeing stars I’ve never seen in the night sky from my vantage point on this planet.

My trans-galactic trip seemed rather quick and much yelling and screaming greeted my return to Earth.  I felt like a Chihuahua surrounded by a pack of very angry wolves. Mom and dad, in very agitated voices yelled at me to apologize to Uncle Jake.

     He was attempting to steal my food for Christ’s sake and they wanted me to apologize to him.  Being the wonderful child I am, and also wanting to live at least another day, I relented and let Jake have the damn pork chop.

     Instead of a nice juicy pork chop and an all around great meal, I had to settle for a scanty helping of mashed potatoes without gravy or butter, a little corn and a half piece of dry bread.  They feed criminals who have done terrible things better than I was being fed.  I didn’t get any dessert either because I had been such a bad boy.  I thought to myself that if Jake and his litter ever did show up at our house again for a free meal; I would just take some of the money I’d saved and go eat at the cafe uptown.  I planned to have a hamburger with fried onions, some French-fries plus a large soda, and I wouldn’t have to share a bit of it.