Kenny and Sue have lived on a small farm behind my parents' farm for around 40 years. Kenny was born there, and lived there for 20 some years before he married Sue. They are neighbors in the sense of someone you have known all of your life, and known well enough to love and hate with equal caring. They are neighbors who have walked across the fields to visit, and gone to the same small schools, and been at the weddings and funerals and BBQs. They went to Dad's funeral a few days ago. they didn't say much. No "If you need help, . . . " because we knew that.
The day after the funeral, my son and I had tickets for an evening flight back to our home. On the way to say goodbye to Mom, we stopped at Kenny and Sue's. They and 3 other families were butchering hogs, a yearly event to stock up on their own meat. Four hogs had been slaughtered the day before, and hung up in the barn to bleed out. Now, couples and friends were busy in old, blood-stained clothes, in 30 degree weather, cutting up carcasses for freezing and making sausages. Something my son has seen a few times on visits to the farm, but we figure you should never forget where food comes from.
We checked out the progress of the butchering, and Sue said that she was boiling a tongue and it should be almost done. I said how much I had always loved tongue, especially pickled tongue; all the parts of an animal are used when you live on a farm, but the organs and muscles aside from regular cuts of meat are special. They have unique texture and flavor, and are rightly considered delicacies. As farm kids, me and my siblings never thought twice about what was put in front of us. Our city-raised kids were not rusticly trained in the Art of Eating What is Set Before You, and don't share our enthusiasm for some things. However, they try. And the cousins who still live in Illinois encourage them in their education, especially if it means offering head cheese, pork hocks, you get the picture.
So when I kind of wistfully mentioned my tastes, Sue without another word put down her (very sharp) knife, went out of the butchering shed and came back in a little bit with some generous slices of tongue for us to sample. It was hot and incredibly tender. It was a very real part of the animal, with the taste buds and the root of the tongue quite obviously naming what it was. No denying, that was somethings tongue. And it was good.
Later, we were ready to leave, and Kenny asked if Mom would like some tongue. I said I don't know, but she might like a little, and if she didn't feel like eating it, there were more grandkids over there who might like to say they ate some pork tongue, once. So Kenny disappeared and returned with a plastic butter tub, which held an entire boiled tongue. I noted that out of only 4 pigs, one tongue was a lot to give. Kenny just said, in his characteristically sleepy way, that he hoped Mom enjoyed it.
We took it with us over to Mom's. She was holding up like a true Marine's wife, which she has always been. We put out the tongue and sliced it up, and teased the faint of heart who wouldn't eat it, and told stories about all the things we'd eaten as kids. Everything at a funeral is a reason to remember other things.
Food is one of the most common expressions of comfort in time of sorrow. This is told in the Christian act of communion, the eating of the body and blood of Christ. It is told in the Hindu deity of the goddess Kali, who is both giver and devourer of life. We eat to live, whether its a pig or a tomato. Death for one thing is life for another, and they become the same thing.
Lots of people brought food to Mom's. I talked to her the day Dad died, and said Mom how are you, and my Mom said "It's been a pretty rough day, Patricia." Understatement is a family trait. But she was sitting at her table with my brother and his wife and they were eating sloppy joes which the next door neighbor had brought over. The next night when I called, she was having fried chicken with her two sisters and Kenny and Sue, who had brought the chicken.
The slaughtered pig's tongue was a small precious gift, of simple generosity and understanding of neighbors. It was a gift which personifies the fear we have of eating flesh, which is not all that different from our flesh. It was a gift of the reality of life and death.
Thanks to Kenny and Sue, for the casual friendship which has been understood for my whole life and which continues without comment or fanfare into the future. And thanks for the tongue.
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