The Weekly Meat

Deliverance

The face she made as she got into the man's truck terrified me. It was the urgent face of a captive with something to tell. She said nothing. Her eyes begged. I said nothing.

She closed the door and the pickup pulled back onto the road to disappear slowly around the next bend.

I walked back to our car. It was mired in the soft shoulder of the road and slanting precariously toward the deep ditch.

I had just pulled off the road to check the map and had misjudged the shoulder, foolishly cut too far right and sank the tires into the sand, unforgiving after the recent rain. It was these things, it was me, that sent her off with a stranger in search of a truck that might give our stuck car a tug.

The stranger seemed nice enough. I would not have been so worried if it weren't for the scar he had — side to side, straight across his neck.

Someone, somewhere in that man's life someone had taken a knife across a healthy, breathing throat. The fact that someone seemed to have wanted the guy dead did not sit well with me.

I noticed the scar straight off the bat. There's no hiding something that size. After the initial, momentary shock, I explained the problem with our car. He said, yes he was from around here, and suggested he give one of us a lift into town to see if he could scare up some help. He was very nice and at any rate, he was the first person who stopped to help us. He had said his name, and Tina and I introduced ourselves. She wanted to be the one to hitch the ride into town, and since the car was mine, I felt I should be the one left stranded with it in the middle of the Adirondacks. My thinking was also that it might be safer for her to go with someone we had already met and gotten a feeling for rather than to wait by the side of the road alone.

I had indeed gotten a feeling about the man. I had seen his face, his eyes. He seemed genuinely glad to help out. I have great confidence in my ability to judge people on a first meeting, so I thought it fine when Tina volunteered to go with him. But the turn of her head and that asking look as she got in the car had given me real pause.

How often are our "feelings" about a person wrong? Maybe only two or three percent of the time. How often can you trust people in a situation like this? Maybe ninety-five percent of the time. Generally, these are numbers I can live with.

But when given the time to walk up and down a desolate patch of rural highway trying to flag down help while one's potential new girlfriend is off in a car with a stranger who has a vicious scar across his throat, one does get to second-guessing. How does the scar affect the odds? Does it? Should it? And what the hell was Tina desperately trying to tell me in that last-second look before she took off in the truck?

I paced back and forth on the side of the road. And thought of Deliverance.

After thirty minutes or so, as it happened, they returned with a tow-truck with a winch on it. The car came free from the soft shoulder, and we were soon on our way again.

So what was the look, I asked Tina later. She said, "I wanted you to get his license plate number. Just in case."

I, of course, had not. Normally so good about things like that — so over-prepared — yet this time it hadn't even occurred to me. We drove on in silence. I wondered what that small failing said about me, and my preparedness for a relationship. She opened her window, and the space between us widened.

Perfect Timing

By guest author Abby Luthin

My husband Ben and I just returned from our first-ever weekend away from our young daughters, a trip to our friends’ wedding in Arizona. No Electric Slide, no boozy toasts or weeping. Just lovely surroundings, fine food and wine, and a fun collection of people there to celebrate the new and classy married couple. It got me thinking, nearly seven years after our own “I do's”, about how far we have come together, and how things might be different if we hadn’t met. Or, more to the point, what would have happened if we’d met at a different time in our lives?

All I know is that I’m glad our paths crossed when they did because if it had been even weeks earlier, Ben and I would have hated each other. And not in a charming Sam and Diane, David and Maddie, Oscar and Felix kind of way. More of a get-a-load-of-this-guy and who-does-she-think-she-is? kind of way.

I recognize that I am very high strung. Understanding this about myself required great caution when Ben and I started dating. He might have thought the slow reveal was a feminine courting technique. I knew that if I disclosed the full reliquary of my eccentric tendencies too early, he might run for the hills.

My type A tendencies bloomed early in life. There was a whole year around the age of eight or so when I read both Hints from Heloise and Emily Post’s Etiquette: A Guide to Modern Manners many times over. If I spilled grape juice on the carpet in my doll house, I knew how to get it out before it stained. Serving cold soup before the main course? I knew which spoon to use. Need to write a letter to a colonel and his companion of many years? I had the proper salutation prepared. When we were far enough along in our relationship for me to mention having collected and absorbed these tomes in my youth (so helpful when picking the exact wording of our wedding invitations!), Ben sighed and noted, again, it was good to have met when we did.

What was Ben doing at the same age? By his own account, he was spilling grape juice, playing street hockey, and extruding mouthfuls of mashed potatoes from the gaps in his teeth.

Our late teens and early twenties also would have seen us as antagonists. One of my earliest memories at Macalester College was of reading about a kamikaze party set for the first weekend of the school year. A teetotaler myself, I thought those who imbibed didn’t take their studies seriously. My look-down-my-nose attitude poorly masked insecurities about not fitting in, but knowing that now didn’t help me one bit then. My roommate explained to me the nature of the event, mentioning that the booze in that dorm suite was always mixed in the bathtub and drunk with a plastic cup scooped into the cocktail. I probably mentioned that "cocktail" was a nice way of putting it, what with the poor sanitary conditions of a bathtub being used for a beverage hold. And then I most likely grabbed my books and headed for the library.

Ben’s college experience? A thousand miles away and four years earlier than mine, let’s just say he hosted plenty of similar parties, and still claims an acute tequila “allergy” stemming from those days.

Immediately before our friends exchanged their wedding vows in Phoenix, their rings were passed among the guests with the request that each person add a silent wish or words of wisdom for the new couple before they wore the bands as husband and wife. I surprised myself by knowing exactly what I wanted to say. That we had known and very much liked the groom before he met his bride, that we liked her right away, and that he’s been especially buoyant ever since. But that it’s important not to forget he’d had his lumps before, as have we all, and that he’d become the person ready for the relationship being formalized into marriage before our eyes the moment she’d walked into his world — and not a second sooner. It’s possible they’d have been happy as high school sweethearts, or college coeds, or twentysomethings in Boston. But I didn’t think so, and not just because of the span when he styled his hair in a fauxhawk. Yet it doesn’t make their partnership now any less powerful.

As Ben and I listened to the wedding tunes during the reception, I thought about how our formative musical experiences wouldn't have endeared us to one another either. In fact, we would never have been at the same venue. My first rock concert was Cyndi Lauper’s "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" tour at Poplar Creek for my twelfth birthday — accompanied by three friends and chaperoned by my mom. I vividly remember being outraged by the price of t-shirts and, as we stood for the entire show, wondering to myself why everyone couldn’t just sit down already so I could use the seat my mom had paid good money for.

Sure, Ben knew about these tunes, but his first concert was the Kinks and he still owns ratty Bruce Springsteen and AC/DC t-shirts. Early in our relationship, I tried to impress him by boasting that I’d seen a concert at Minneapolis’s hip First Avenue, which for me meant that I’d evolved past the music of my early teen years. Naturally, he asked who I’d seen, hoping for Hüsker Dü, or the Replacements, or at the very least Prince. There was a long, awkward silence after I answered Big Country (I still have the ticket stub to prove it!). I filled this void with an approximation of the "bagpipe” solo from "In a Big Country." And yes, dear reader, he still married me.

During my post-graduate years, due to too much Tour de France viewing combined with my now unsurprising lack of dating experience, I had a few quirky requirements for the guys I dated. One was that the boy be clean-shaven. Ben? Thankfully, just weeks before we met, he had shaved off a soul patch he’d been sporting for ages. Another prerequisite was a very specific height and physique: over six feet, gaunt, and, preferably, with hairless biker legs. While Ben’s nowhere near gaunt, he’s also not quite, even in hockey skates, anywhere near six feet. He’s also refused to shave his legs.

Ben’s requirements, as I know now, were nearly as precise. He never thought he’d be interested in someone who’d never had a driver’s license. Or who has kept a record of every book read and movie viewed since 1988. (And he hasn’t even seen the rating and cross-referencing systems I’ve added.) He never thought he’d be interested in someone whose personal life soundtrack is stuck in the Top 40 of 1987, or whose earliest reference material reading was of household stain removal and etiquette guides. Or who could even name her earliest childhood reference material reading.

Superficial? You bet. But don’t we all try to control our romantic leanings because it’s out of our hands who we fall for? That’s not to say some differences aren’t insurmountable. Just that there’s something to be said for relaxing a bit and following our instincts and letting what we do have in common — the important things — speak for themselves. Because it’s at the moment you’re willing to go on a date with the hairy-legged boy, or confess that you thought Hüsker Dü was a type of child’s toy akin to the hula hoop, or ditch whatever else it is that keeps you in such a safe place you’re unwilling to grow, that amazing, wonderful things can happen.

So after the ceremony in Arizona, as we tooled back to our hotel in our rental car — the windows down, the cool desert air blowing in — “Angel in the Centerfold” came over the stereo. I said, “You can change it” at exactly the same time as Ben shook his head and turned up the volume. Perfect timing, indeed.

My Old School

Recently, my wife AKL and I have been watching the British documentary "Up Series" of films (gotta love Netflix), which posits the conceit, "Give me a child at age seven, and I will give you the man." Beginning with a dozen or so seven-year-olds in 1964, it then revisits them every seven years to find out how they have changed. Filmed interview-style, without the now-clichéd "Reality TV" filters, it allows a fascinating look at long-term personal growth.

And so, lately, there has been that question in the back of my mind, about whether or not the truest, most unadulterated portrait of me might have come at age seven. I was a nice, happy kid then, if a bit shy. I was creative and smart; maybe I didn't yet have a keen sense of humor, but I had not yet begun to edit myself in the affected way that, eventually, we all do.

Throughout my teens and twenties, I ran away from that seven-year-old a bit, but in the past ten years, I've come to admire the kid I was. And now, with children of my own, I find myself chasing down leads on that seven-year-old, looking for answers on parenting, and a return to that simple honesty.

So, after 20 years, though I didn't much like high school — I never quite found my niche there; I was never quite comfortable in my own skin; and, well, I don't suffer fools gladly — I figured it might finally be enlightening, and even fun, to go to a class reunion. And indeed it was.

I was remembered there by some folks whose names I had long forgotten, maybe even slightly more fondly than I'd have thought. But the real kick I got was not from seeing friends and classmates I hadn't spoken to in 20 years, but specifically from seeing those few with whom I had gone to elementary school. Yes, we had all continued along the same track to high school, but our elementary school was a special place — not only to me, but to them as well — and so we share a peculiar bond.

Though it was a suburban school, in the heart of Philadelphia's Main Line, it was not served by buses. All of the students walked there, and none lived more than 10–15 minutes away. That said, it had as diverse a population as could have been found in most suburban schools in the early '70s — an Ellis Island mix of whites, blacks, Chinese, Greeks, Italians, Irish, Jews, Catholics, Protestants. No one was egregiously poor or rich, but we ran the gamut from lower to upper middle class.

We all played together, as kids do — because the world hadn't yet taught us not to. And it was a blessing, to grow up in a small community in which not everyone looked alike and we were comfortable with that fact; in which some of my first kisses were interracial.

Because there was no bus service (and no technology for parents to nag us on cellphones), and more open field space than is possible for most schools today, there was daily loitering after classes. Good, clean loitering, mostly, the sort of which forces kids to bond. A few fights, sure, but mainly just hanging out, alternately chasing girls and being chased by girls; sliding on winter ice; playing four-square, or wall-ball, or "kill the cow."

We were pretty good kids, occasionally stupid and prone to splitting a lip, but it was loosely a neighborhood rule that when the church bells rang that evening, we all had to troop back to our respective homes. And we did.

Some days we'd head to the large park around the corner, or to a friend's house, or to catch crayfish in the creek of an open field behind an old age home. We walked or rode bikes; nearly all we wanted in life was only ever a few blocks away.

My own street dead-ended into the school, and at least once, my dog followed me right through the doors, into morning classes.

Stories of the school are legendary. Everyone of my era knows whose dad punched out the principal, which teachers had warts, which presumably unlucky students moved away, and what grade we were all in when the school closed. (Sadly, some budgetary truths are inevitable, and in 1977, Wynnewood Road Elementary School shut its doors as part of the Lower Merion School District, and the giant lot was sold off and subdivided for new housing.)

When we found out it was closing, it really stung, and even in fourth grade, as I was, we knew it had been our Camelot, and that nowhere else could provide quite as singular an experience.

And sure enough it did not. I remember the next year as being fun, and I made some new friends, but when we got to the new school (by bus), we, the outsiders, didn't quite pity the natives, but we thought them less fortunate. They hadn't been shaped by such a unique place as we had.

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It's tough in retrospect, of course, to know how rosy the lenses are through which I remember my days in elementary school. I think of that era in many ways as the best of my life. But there are levels to reality, and my wistfulness makes it tough to separate the actual from the burnished, from the imagined. (Or as Tim O'Brien puts it in his brilliant book on Vietnam, The Things They Carried, the "happening-truth" from the "story-truth.")

Clearly, it was a simpler time for me personally, but it was a simpler time for us all, an era in which kids could stay and play on school grounds after classes (without any administrators worrying about liability), or go a couple blocks over to the park and do the stuff of elementary school kids without being hassled.

I live now in an incredibly diverse area of Boston, among Brazilians, Indians, Caribbeans, Asians — and I am thankful my daughters will grow up in such an environment. And when I listen to the patchwork patois of our playgrounds, I think about my old school — and hope to do justice to the sons and daughters of it.

In Waiting

With the season upon us in which we tend to receive those folksy yearly recap letters from far-flung friends, I thought it might be an appropriate time to post this piece — which could very well have stood as a sobering, non-traditional holiday letter for AKL and me exactly three years ago. You need to know up front that ultimately, things turned out quite well for us, and we couldn't be happier (or more tired). But life reveals itself slowly, and as a time capsule, this seems no less worth putting out there. --BK

My wife AKL and I have been trying unsuccessfully to have children for the past two and a half years. Recently, we had our third miscarriage.

Three times we have been through the unbelievable loss and hurt — I never again want to hear a sound as sad as AKL’s open sobbing through the bathroom door when we lost the first — and then the shift into medical crisis mode, and then the aftermath: weeks or months of emotional fragility.

All the while, we lived in social awkwardness. As our pregnancies were not yet public knowledge, there was no public acknowledgment of our losses. So we kept going to the office, feeling distracted from the same work we hoped would distract us from our far more complex troubles. We wore no armbands, nor dressed in black — nothing outside the norm, but for a handful of hushed, coded conversations and emails. Coworkers and friends may have wondered, but they didn’t pry, and we didn’t offer, assuming most would not have been prepared for our honest answer when they asked us perfunctorily, “How’s it going?”

Our second loss was in July 2004, and we spent a horribly uncomfortable week cringing at every mention of the “DNC” (Democratic National Convention) — in our hometown of Boston, no less — while dealing with our impending “D&C.”

Full disclosure: we’re card-carrying pro-choice Democrats. But when you have a miscarriage, even early in the first trimester, rhetorical, clinical terms like embryo or fetus or viable go out the window, because in your gut what has just happened is that, quite simply, your baby has died.

Throughout, friends and family have tried to be helpful. Though it feels nice to be loved, their attempts at help are generally centered around stories of their friends or acquaintances who went through similar travails to eventually succeed. People who have three boys now and are happy, or some such. While I understand the hopeful message of these tales, because they’re about success, they don’t have much to do with our present situation. And with each loss, we pay a higher emotional price for our hope. Yes, we might wind up being those folks. But we might not. We might be the friends who tried and tried and then, because the trying was killing them, stopped trying on their own and either tried to adopt, or didn’t. We don’t know.

Sometimes I convince myself that one’s ability to have kids must be inversely proportional to one’s desire to have kids. Surely, if we were a couple of 15-year meth addicts, we’d have our own basketball team by now — but we’re not. AKL and I are 33 and 37, respectively (“you still have so much time,” you say); we have a home, steady jobs, a healthy relationship, love to give, and we have wanted children since we got engaged nearly five years ago. We waited two years: until we had gotten married, until we moved out of our little condo, until AKL finished grad school, and then we were ready. But nature doesn’t work according to human timetables. This difficult fact that none of us gets to decide when we might have a baby underscores our biggest struggle: the powerlessness of our situation. There are certain things we can do to help our prospects, but there is far more over which we have absolutely no control.

I thought about waiting to tell our story, to see how it all turns out. Maybe — hopefully — it will have a happy ending (yes, we understand, full of new challenges). But to wait would be to miss the real story, which is about our trying to cope with the agonizing uncertainty of right now.

Because the truth is, we’re having a really difficult time with it. The week or two after each miscarriage was emotionally — and in AKL’s case, physically as well — grueling, but together we muddled through, in crisis mode, on adrenaline, love, bad movies, and comfort food. The lingering psychological aftermath is tougher, as post-trauma, we find ourselves struggling to regain our bearings. And each time, we are forced to re-address the question of why we want children to begin with, and how we feel about ourselves without them.

AKL and I communicate well, but when we do nag or argue, miscarriage is the elephant in the room. When we talk about our cats, we’re really talking about our children. When we talk about our friends or our family or a possible vacation, we’re really talking about children.

It has been a long time since life felt normal. Before monthly planning and hormone spikes took over our sex life. Before the losses and the hospitals and the specialists. Before a nurse handed me a sterile cup and asked me to produce that certain sample (healthcare-subsidized porn at the ready). We’ll never regain the absolute joy of finding out we’re pregnant: the big ultrasound, talking excitedly about names, hearing a heartbeat….

That unfettered innocence is gone, and our story is rooted in the present. The ending is uncertain. We do what we can, but the rest is beyond us. So we sit and fidget with the not knowing. Today first, and then tomorrow, and then the next. Waiting to see where, eventually, it all leads.

Addiction

With the holiday party season nearing full tilt, I think it's time I come to terms with some personal trouble I've been having lately. OK, for a long time.

One year, in my bachelor days — when life was both more exciting and more boring — my age-old friend Spider and I decided we'd each make our New Year's resolution to develop six-pack abs. We were both fairly active guys who had once been in shape. We each figured what the hell, the mutual competition would keep us honest and spur us on, and the rippled stomachs would surely, we thought, be a hit with the single ladies.

I can't remember how close Spider got to that six-pack, other than to say that he has only slightly less body hair than Robin Williams and Tom Selleck combined, and I believe he ultimately chose to simply comb the hair on his stomach in such a way as to give the impression of a six-pack. God knows what was actually under the hair.

My own quest was more enlightening than successful. No matter how many sit-ups, crunches, etc. I did, I was never really able to get past a solid four-pack. Those bottom two ab cuts just would not show themselves. It didn't take long for me to realize why. Beyond the fact that I simply did not have the mental discipline to work out every single day, I knew at a core level that those two muscles would be forever hidden under an unyielding layer of beer and cheese.

So, a few months into the year, I gave up my resolution. The experiment had paid some dividends, but when push came to shove, I was not willing, at that stage of my life, to give up either beer or cheese.

Soul searching ensued. If I had to choose one, I wondered, which could I actually give up, beer or cheese? Ultimately, I decided, it would be far easier for me to give up beer. I would miss it, sure. But life without cheese? Get real.

I don't just like cheese, I dream of it, pine after it, live for it. Always have. I have my cheeses of choice, for those times I need something stronger than vacuum-packed cheddar, and I love nothing more than spending a good hour in a proper, local fromagerie. Going to Neal's Yard in London was like a personal cheese hajj.

Mind you, my cheese eating has not all been quite so glamorous. I've had more than my share of cubed orange colby-jack at office parties. And I mean cubes that have been sitting for hours, sweating under the glow of holiday cheer and bad jazz. I've opened the tub of squeaky-fresh cheese curds before even exiting Wisconsin farm stands, eaten poutine for breakfast, and scraped the last bits of jarred Whiz onto my cheesesteak. I've reveled in individually-wrapped slices of pasteurized process cheese food product, creamy WisPride logs, and bacon-cheddar squirt cheese. I've had my brushes with hitting rock bottom; I know why the caged cow laughs.

But am I addicted?

To find out, I turned to the source. Alcoholics Anonymous has a list of 12 questions for self diagnosis. They tell us that "Yes" answers to four or more questions may indicate that you have a problem. Highlights are as follows. My honest answers are in line with the questions.

1 - Have you ever decided to stop [eating cheese] for a week or so, but only lasted for a couple of days?

Yes.

3 - Have you ever switched from one kind of [cheese] to another in the hope that this would keep you from getting cheese-drunk?

Yes.

4 - Have you had to have an eye-opener upon awakening during the past year?

One word: pizza.

7 - Has your [cheese eating] caused trouble at home?

No. But my wife might be what they call an "enabler"; or worse, an addict herself.

8 - Do you ever try to get "extra" [cheese] at a party because you do not get enough?

God, yes. I eat party cheese like a starving college student, uncertain as to when and where I might stumble onto my next free meal.

9 - Do you tell yourself you can stop [eating cheese] any time you want to, even though you keep getting cheese-drunk when you don't mean to?

Yes.

12 - Have you ever felt that your life would be better if you did not [eat cheese]?

Yes. Specifically, my cholesterol and might be lower, my weight slightly lower, I might be more in fighting trim, with a thinner waist — and six-pack abs.

The addiction question. According to my answers — as the Magic 8-Ball likes to say — "signs point to yes."

So what next? Am I ready to give it up? I don't honestly know. The program tells us that the first step is to admit we are powerless over cheese. Forget the other 11 steps for now; I'm living one day at a time, one holiday party at a time. If you see me on the street, wallowing in a self-pitying stink-breath cheese hangover of yet another aged gruyere, get me to a meeting. My name is BK, and I'm a cheese addict.