It was either Thanksgiving or Christmas, but I think it was Thanksgiving. I was about six years old and — characteristically — helping my mom in the kitchen. Thanks to the recent spate of impromptu social media videos I have been posting, the public appears to be discovering I know how to cook. Spoiler alert, I learned how to cook when I was a kid. While others of my generation were latchkey kids, fending for themselves with whatever they could find in the pantry, I was in the kitchen talking constantly (some things never change), helping my mom with whatever she was making for supper.
Breakfast, dinner, supper. Brunch was a foreign thing that yuppies had while wearing polo shirts with white slacks or big, flappy sweaters and oversized jewelry. Lunch was something that apparently involved salads and were had by business people. For us, breakfast was cereal and milk and instant coffee, a tradition that proved extremely difficult for me as I grew into a lanky, hungry 140-pound boy whose blood sugar was constantly crashing before noon.
Dinner was always at noon and usually consisted — for us — of leftovers from the night before, along with bread and butter. In fact, most everything involved bread and butter, and you'd be surprised how good cold spaghetti is as a sandwich. Midwestern farm families with mid-century tendencies were far-removed from the dictates of low-carb or gluten-free or carnivore- or Mediterranean- or Nordic- diets, or the litany of other nutritional ideas that have sprung forth onto the internet in the last 20 years.
Supper was the substantial meal, the one meal we cooked consistently and always involved meat, starch, vegetable and dessert, sometimes two. Pan-fried round steak, fried pork chops, a rump roast in the oven, fried chicken, smoked grilled pork chops, paired with mashed potatoes or baked potatoes or sweet potatoes, a can of green beans or pork-and-beans or creamed corn, and then Jell-O (with fruit), and a cake or a pie or a pudding or cinnamon rolls. My mom made the best homemade bread and that was made at least once a week. We lived good and ate better than most and — unfortunately — dreamed of eating out in big town restaurants. Today, I'd give anything to eat another of my mom's meals again, even if there was a clear reason. I grew up so...fluffy. It's hard to be lean and fierce when raised on a steady diet of homemade cinnamon rolls.
But for this particular late autumn morning, I was helping my mom with a holiday meal and that meant we had gone to the IGA store and gotten one of those big canned hams with the fancy metal key that untwists the top. Insert ode to modern 20th century food miracles: The processed ham that unlocks itself. I wasn't very old and the idea of that canned ham key was intoxicating and I asked if I could open the thing up. "Sure," my mom said warily, then added, "but it's harder than it looks."
Harder was an understatement. I managed about four twists before my hand started hurting and I withdrew, looking to my mom to finish. And that's when she told me this story:
"When I was a little kid, we got a ham just like this and I thought it would be so much fun to open up. I asked and grandma let me start. And it hurt my hand so I stopped. And grandma said, 'You wanted to do that. Now you need to finish it.' So I did. And it really hurt but I worked and worked, opened it all the way." After telling me the story, I tried the same and — though if memory serves my mom helped me — we did get it open and I learned the first of many valuable lessons:
When you start something, you finish it and sometimes things look awful fun from a distance, but they start to hurt mighty bad after you get started. Back in those days, my mom worried I would grow up irresponsible, and grandma was sure I would grow up spoiled and lazy. Fortunately, thanks to them both, that was not the case, but it could have happened and the thought is frightening. Far too often, I see what does happen when adults don't really grow up and think things are awfully fun until they actually have to do the work. Because the truth is, life often isn't fun. Being an adult is hard, much harder than we think it ought to be. And there is pain and doubt and hardship every step of the way. A testament to good parenting, my mom was kind but did her darnedest to ensure I knew how to work and study and think for myself. And I resisted absolutely as much as I could every step of the way but she wore me down, finally making me responsible and hardworking, all by the old age of 14. And if memory serves correctly, it all started with a canned ham key.
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