Meat as Madeleine

Life is many things. Human life, anyway. It is miraculous, as is all life, of course—but a human’s life can be miraculous in ways that a meerkat’s or a sea worm’s probably can’t--primarily due to a meerkat or a sea worm being less self-aware than a human or less able to process the things that occur to and around it. A terrestrial life form other than a human cannot experience wonder. I don’t think a meerkat can experience wonder. Confusion, perhaps, but not wonder. This is a positive to being human, I submit.

On the other hand, there are things like melancholy. Melancholy, like wonder, is something that I imagine your various beastly herds do not experience. I might be wrong here. I know I have seen animals display things that look like sadness and sympathy, but I am not wholly convinced that that is what I am seeing. However, if they can experience sadness and sympathy, then I don’t imagine melancholy is much of a leap, and my whole idea falls apart. That is not a bad thing. If my whole idea falls apart, it is only because a new idea has replaced it. And what is better than a new idea? But, if I may, let’s accept that melancholy is a completely and singularly human feeling.

Melancholy, to the dichotomous mind, is probably a bad thing. Assuming that dichotomy is good/bad. If it’s color-based or number-based, I don’t know what category melancholy fits in. If I had to put it somewhere in those two possible dichotomies, I would put melancholy in the blue category and the three category (three being a completely arbitrary assignment on my part, fully recognizing that a dichotomy consists of two categories, which makes three a less-than-logical choice…ergo, arbitrary). However, there are many times when melancholy is a good thing. Or, at worst, it is precipitated by some association with a good thing.  After all, isn’t that the basis of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time?

This is all brought up by a particularly Proustian moment that I recently had. (I promise that this will not last for anywhere close to three-thousand pages, but I can’t promise that it will be any more entertaining or make any more sense than Proust.) I was making a meat sauce for our New Year’s Eve lasagna (a sort-of tradition). I started the sauce with a piece of pork, sautéed in some onions and garlic. This hunk o’ pig simmers along with the rest of the sauce for hours, just like the hunk of neck bone that my grandmother used to put in her sauce. After the sauce is cooked down (about three hours), the pork comes out, super-tender and super-flavorful.

Some cooks might shred that super-super meat and put it back in the sauce. Not me. My grandmother taught me that that is the most exquisite kitchen-counter meat-eating experience, to stand there and snack on the stew meat (sauce, soup, stew, whatever). So that is what I did. 

That first taste of pork immediately threw my synapses into a high-speed game of taste-and-go-seek. Like the whiff of your long-dead aunt’s perfume immediately puts you back in her presence, this taste of pork immediately shot my mind feed from live to video, and, for a split-second, I was in my grandmother’s EZ-bricked kitchen--with WITH (“The Music of Your Life” and the flagship station of the Baltimore Skipjack’s radio network) playing Nat “King” Cole--and tearing little pieces of steaming hot saucy pork off the bone with a woman I still miss almost every day, even after fifteen years. The memory was attended by the instantaneous melancholy that comes from any nostalgic recreation of genuinely good experience and the recollection of lost loved ones.

This is not remarkable, of course. It happens to everybody, every day, I suspect. This time of year, or the period just past, since the holiday season is just about over, probably jars all of us into both pleasant and unpleasant remembrances of things past. Usually, these feelings come and go so quickly, we might not even have the time to dwell on them. However, in this moment, I was lucky; I had time, as I stood alone in the kitchen to really allow myself the experience. I let the sad feelings wash over after the initial shot of joy.  But I realized, as I ruminated on the present meat and the past moment, that it was ultimately a happy moment. There was that one split second of a split second, that one half of a half of a heartbeat when I was really there, really back in that kitchen, twenty years ago. It was a pleasant visit. The sadness, the melancholy, comes from that realization that I have no control, really, over how (and/or when) I get back. I can think about things like the past and the people whom I miss who are no longer a part of my life at my own volition, but it is not the same. Only the unconscious parts of my brain have the real power to completely transport me back to wherever. I look forward to going back.