Tied Up With String, or Without

Before my youngest daughter slipped into serious vegetarianism, we would occasionally devour a pound of meat together, in the form of two half pound pub burgers. No buns necessary. Growing up in New York, where delis routinely stuffed obscene piles of meat between two rather nondescript slices of Jewish rye, I have always been about the innards of a sandwich.

My passion for a five inch stack of sliced pastrami has dimmed over the years, but my devotion to burgers remains strong.  I was raised on expensive kosher ground beef, straight from the little butcher shop on Avenue J -- never prepackaged from a grocery store. Sometimes, when I was little, we would walk there (though she had a license, my mother didn't sneak off on a death defying whim behind the wheel of my father's Cadillac until years later to reacquaint herself with driving), but mostly she would place her meat order on Monday morning by telephone. It would arrive later that afternoon, the ground beef, the rib steaks, the veal cutlets, the baby lamb chops -- each item meticulously wrapped up like a present in brown paper. Just as meticulously, she would unwrap and rewrap each item for freezing. 

As I remember it, Wednesday was burger night. My mother, never much of a chef, always made our burgers from scratch. Fastidious as she has always been -- she was repulsed by the thought of touching raw cookie dough -- she thought nothing of plunging her perfectly manicured hands into a bowl filled with ground beef, raw egg, and a bit of broken Wonder bread. Her hands speckled with burger bits and glazed with egg, she would shape the mixture into plump patties, always leaving some in the bowl for me. Yes, at least once a week, I feasted on raw egg and raw meat before dinner. Maybe that explains something. Not sure what, but something. It's a good memory, nevertheless. 

Dinner was predictable and orderly. At six o'clock (give or take a minute or two) I would thrill to the sound of my father's key in the door. I loved that he was home, and I loved that it was dinner time. No matter what was on the menu, every stone in the food pyramid was properly represented, including processed sugar for dessert. My brother, my father, and I always sat in the same seats, as my mother meted out portions and whisked away plates when she decided it was time for us to move on. To this day, I sit in my same old chair when I visit, even though the well-used broiler has long been retired and it's been years since I waited eagerly for my father to arrive home. 

Dinner time when my own children were growing up was quite a different thing. The only thing predictable about it was the availability of something edible; timing and nutritional value was always up for grabs. I like to think the chaos benefited them somehow, made them more adaptable. It amazes me sometimes when they reminisce. There was no predictable daily routine, nothing like the regularly reenacted evenings of my childhood. No glue, I sometimes think, to help the memories stick. Yet somehow they do. 

Haphazard as it all was, though, our ill-defined dinner time seems as firmly embedded in their psyches as six o'clock dinner in Brooklyn all those years ago is in mine. My daughter even remembers our pub burgers fondly, though she cannot even imagine, these days, eating meat. I suppose it's all about the innards, no matter what, all the stuff piled in between the nondescript bookends of what once was and what is still to be.