Ensuring Life

The Book of Barkley is down to two chapters left to go (I've written well over forty so far,  at least one a day since he died).  The formatting and editing will take a week and then it's off to a publisher with fingers crossed. I figured I could craft and hone and tweak it for weeks to make it perfect, but it's no more perfect than I.  What you will get is simply the story of a dog and the family that loved him, laid out in a time of loss.


Until then - I will give you some thoughts from a field.

Gives Us This Day Our Daily Bread.It's printed on an enamel and iron trivet by my Dad's stove. It's been there since the earliest memories, days waking from the peaceful slumber of childhood, yawning as I entered the safe, warm light radius of the kitchen. Paul Harvey would be on the radio with the rest of the story and Mom would be setting out eggs and hot or cold cereal and milk, toast and fruit. There would be only one box of  cold cereal to pick from.

I go to others houses now and there are six boxes of cereal, in various degrees of stale, each person having one, maybe two they like, opened. Not at our house, we didn't waste anything. But the boxes of cereal still takes me back to another day, another thought.

After my Mom died, I knew Dad eventually dated, I just didn't really want to know.  I was not yet understanding of  the dynamics of that particular  loneliness, just wishing it would go back the way it was, the blurred picture in a frame of her, not replaced by someone more alive.

But one day, after I'd been away, I was rummaging around in the cupboard, I found TWO boxes of cereal, the one Dad liked and another one. He came in the room in his pajamas and bathrobe with a copy of "Our Daily Bread" and the Bible for his daily morning reading.  Jokingly, I said,  "so, Dad, whose Bran Buds are these?"

I was just teasing, but  he turned all shades of red, and finally admitted he was seeing someone, and they wished to be married but he was afraid I would not approve of him remarrying only a few years after Mom died. She was a widow, a wonderful lady from his hometown in Montana, a close friend of another friend of the family.

They were married on December 29th, when it was 29 below in that little Montana town. The turnout  at the little Lutheran church was surprisingly large, it was a wedding, there was alcohol, and 29 below, even without wind chill factored in, is nothing to long time Montana residents or Big Bro and my older step brothers who'd weathered the cold waters of warfare.

But my Step Mom, like my Mom before her, grew up in the Depression and she remembered well going without, going hungry, everyone breaking sweat and bread to keep the family going. Clothes were mended and handed down to cousins or younger siblings, toys and household items were repaired, gardens were planted and fruit trees in the back yard were picked. Firearms were meticulously maintained, passed down from one generation to the next without required proof of sale or background check, carefully tended and used only to provide, protect and practice the skills to do both.

At home, and even at school, you ate what was served.  If you didn't, you would go hungry. Meat on the table was not often from the store, outside of chicken (though there were two "Easter Chicks" that grew up too fast for a subdivision and mysteriously disappeared to live on some "happy farm with all their friends" (which probably closely resembled a dutch oven.) But even as children, we understood where meat came from, that it was once a living thing, it was a blessing, not something to be wasted.  It was not something to be killed for sport and left to rot, but something that was taken for the table, for the lean winter months.

I shook, my head at a comment in a magazine I looked at while getting my hair cut the other day, vilifying a country singer who hunts, for serving venison at her wedding.  The letter to the editor said something to the effect of  "I can understand hunting if you're poor and can't buy meat but you can afford . . etc etc." Does this person not realize that if you buy meat from the store, the animal still lost its life for your meal? Perhaps you didn't dispatch it, but it's just as dead. Yes, venison was once a deer, but your burger was once a cow, that McNugget once a chicken  (though that's open to debate).

Man has dominion over the animals, a right as fundamental as others we have to protect and sustain our family.  But it's a role that should be exercised, not  with pride, but with humility, honoring the stewardship we have been charged with, just as we should honor the laws of our God and our community.

Beef was usually half of a steer Dad would raise each year  with another family, the animal in a pasture out behind a house.  Fish wasn't in sticks or wrapped in rice and seaweed, it was caught in a local river and brought home fresh.  Dad's love for fishing was something I never understood until I stood out in a stream in hip boots, as shadows shortened and the birds began their song, finding that the quest for that steelhead was very much like the quest for truth, those fracturable and sinewy threads of existence. As that steelhead fought with the conclusive and futile bid for the fate it had not compassed, I understood that these trips for him, really weren't about the fish.

I once submitted a piece of my writing to a well known fishing and hunting magazine at the urging of one of their editors who is a  reader here. I got a personal reply from the editor in chief. He thought the writing was excellent but the work was too "philosophical" for their publication. Perhaps it was, but I never viewed the hunt as a conquering, of high adventure and testosterone, but rather being a witness and participant in a drama that is at once as small as it is large.

Certainly, there is laughter around a deer camp, the camaraderie, the mosquitoes as big as your thumb and that time you got stuck in what was the rare North American fishhook plant. There are stories, embers reflected in a glass of whiskey, a friend's hand helping you up when you stumble in the wild.  But  it's also  the psychology of quest, the contemplation of ethics and a quiet celebration of the minute details of nature. It is the hunt, it is food on the table, and it is so much more.

Yesterday, a colleague asked about recent hunting, and we got into the subject of processing the meat.  The last deer I took was processed at home, in a kitchen as sanitized as a surgical table, with wicked knives and sweat.  It took over six hours to do it by hand in the chilled room, to ensure every bit of connective tissue was removed, every remaining bit of meat saved, from the choicest pieces to the lesser bits.  Even the fresh liver was used, to make a pate that would make you swoon, even if you hate liver.

As the task was  finished, I looked in the mirror and my visage was eerily similar to other days, exhaustion, blood and the indestructible fragility of bone written on my face, in my eyes a quiet prayer for my own safety and sustenance. I am human, yet I share much with the deer.  Both of us wombed by accident, both surviving the fire and loss of youth, if only by blending in the background in utter stillness or running as hard as we could.  As I wrapped up the bones and the bits that could not be used, to bury, not to be thrown out like trash, I remember such things.

I remember that moment when I first saw the deer, its step like soft silk upon the soil, muzzle moving down to chuff at the water, senses poised even as I said a quiet thank you and raised my rifle.  I remember when the shot fired out, and the whitetail leaped forward into the dirt, stomping its shadow into dust, already dead, just not knowing it. In that moment, that absolute and hair-trigger rapport of blood, I had relegated to oblivion some living thing, so that I could live, strong and nourished. In that moment it was freed of hunger and hurt and unclaimed needs, yet in an act of purpose, by my hand. No matter what, that is not something I take lightly, and with the food that sustains me, that is not wasted, I do remember.

Those days in the forest serve to remind me of the fundamentals of predator and prey, of entitlement versus guardianship. I am reminded that increasingly, as the sinews of society are torn by those that consume without care, that I too, may have to fight for what I have, for my defenses, my own life,  I'm reminded of the tools and weapons my family had to save and provide.  Such weapons weren't deemed evil by the acts that evil  commits with them, but were sovereign proof of our God given right to defend our own and provide for our family, neither right bound or loosened by the transitory powers of an elected body of man. They were tools that ensure that our dreams aren't handed over to a failed cold yesterday of irascible and ceaseless regret.

For, like my family before me, I have my firearms.  Many of them old, collectors pieces actually, a few simply tools of protections. I don't look at them and see evil.  Only he who holds them has that quality.  I see them as tools of courage that define a persons freedom, of the mechanical workings of objects which support self sufficiency and strength.

I have a deep respect for old tools and old machines, the human values they represent. Nothing that withstands history gets built without brilliance of design, a laboring effort and the dreams of man. Some say a gun is a killing instrument. Man is a killing instrument. The gun is only a tool, from which we have the pure mechanical force which can keep one alive or take a life. As a tool it is as weak or as strong as he or she who hold its, as good or as bad as the collective soul that keeps it in working order. The guns I own are defenders of good, soldier's weapons, officer's weapons, my weapons.

With them, I would protect my family as I would  provide for my table.  Neither act is to be done without deep thought as to conscious and conduct, the laws of God and the community. Neither are to be done without consideration of consequences for any such actions.   For that is what stewardship is.

It's a quiet day though there will be time for friends later this weekend. Til then, I'll take the carcass of a roast chicken and boil it down for soup stock, take the vegetables that won't be used this weekend and freeze them for stew before they turn brown, and set out a package of game meat  to thaw for supper. "Give us this day our daily bread. . . "

Then I will clean my firearms.  Not just one that is near me in the home should I need it at rest, but also the one that travels with me, where I may be the prey, instead of the predator. ". . . Deliver us from evil." 

There is so much more in that simple labor of care than simply the task that's being done.  It's the big things and small things that are entwined within the minute details of the ordinary.  Things we often take for granted until they are lost, small details in the day, what the living do to ensure life.

 - Brigid