Considering comfort food in the time of COVID-19
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- March 20, 2021
- 740
Toilet paper I can wrap my head around.
Disinfectant wipes, hand sanitizer, bottled water, even wine in a bag and frozen pizza … all these items I can understand being hoarded by folks over the course of a year that has altered so much.
But meat loaf mix?
Seriously?
To quote Jackson Browne: “Someone’s gonna have to explain it to me … I’m not sure what it means.”
Those little packets of seasonings have all but vanished from the groceries in the town I’ve called home since the turn of the century.
Now is it possible I’ve just been unlucky, that had I wheeled my cart around the next turn a minute earlier, I would have found at least one of those envelopes of mixed spices?
Sure. Lord knows I’ve had a black cloud hanging over me a while.
Remember Altamont?
In December 1969, the Rolling Stones — gambling on cashing in on the good vibrations generated at Woodstock four months earlier — set up a free concert that brought the '60s to a horrifying climax.
The Hell’s Angels stomped on kids and stabbed a guy to death, ODs and bad trips doomed the mood, and all of a sudden, what would happen at Kent State five months later seemed predictable.
The world was tilting on its wobbly axis as the '70s dawned, bleak and brutal, and everyone was gearing up for madness and mayhem, just hoping to stay out of the crossfire storm and survive.
It was a good time for meatloaf.
It is to comfort food what Sunday services are to Christians; i.e., something warm and filling and satisfying, a trusted refuge.
Mom was always experimenting with her meatloaf recipe, which, as I look back and try to extrapolate her basic concept, probably didn’t involve the seasoning packages I’ve come to rely on.
Instead, she scoured the newspaper for different approaches, alternatives to the one reliable dish we all knew and loved. This, as you can imagine, caused more than a little consternation and confusion around the kitchen table.
“What’re those yellow things?”
“Is that a raisin?”
“Um, Mom … did you put bacon in this?”
Oh, I’m sure glad my mother had the patience of a saint … also that sharp steak knives weren’t part of the silverware display.
But we were just children, the three of us, and liable to say hurtful things without meaning to inflict real damage. Though from my vantage point all these decades later, Mom would have been more than justified in sending us all upstairs with no supper.
And had she taken the notion and stabbed a fork into my eye, no jury in the world would have convicted her.
“Your honor,” the foreperson would have intoned, “it is our unanimous opinion that this good woman deserves better kids, especially the older boy, the one we’ve begun calling ‘Wretched Flea’ in the deliberation room. He’s Satan’s spawn, for sure.”
At the risk of unfairly implicating my siblings, though, I will truthfully attest we were — as a unit — utterly uninvolved in kitchen cleanup tasks that other children took on without coercion.
I’d seen it with my own eyes when eating at friends’ houses, the way entire broods would combine forces to alleviate the stress on their moms and dads, willingly — even eagerly — taking care of clearing, washing, drying and putting away the dishes.
What stunned me was they did it without being asked.
So I decided to try and bring a little of that good-kid behavior to our house, but when I picked up the broom and began sweeping crumbs from under the table into a neat pile, my father stopped me.
“That,” he said, not unkindly, “is my job. Go on upstairs and beat up your brother, the way you do every night.”
Well, I made up that last part, but you get the idea.
My parents had developed a clean and concise division of labor, one that accounted for every possible variation, every unforeseen surprise, a method so fundamentally sound as to near perfection.
This may sound ridiculously self-serving, but there was simply no room for any of us in their comfortable, well-established and loving routine, one that always ended rather religiously, with Mom sprinkling cloves on a glowing stove burner, sending clouds of pungent incense into the air as Dad leashed our dog for her walk.
Those were among the most sacrosanct rituals of my growing-up years, and they used to be reassuring even to the point of rationalizing away my conspicuous abdication of, well, duty.
In short, I should have been a better son.
As a server in good standing from the time I was 9 until I outgrew my role as a “Knight of the Altar” along about the winter the Beatles broke up, I had been schooled quite seriously in the art of preparing for and cleaning up after a meal. Of course, in the Roman Catholic faith, Mass was the solemn celebration of the Last Supper, and there were things an altar boy both did before and after the ritual that became habits.
Candles were lighted and extinguished. Prayers were recited, and towels were used and cleansed. Cruets were collected, linens were stored and the carpet was examined for waxy drips or stray Communion host slivers.
The Lord’s house was put in perfect condition before the last altar boy left the church and joined his classmates for science. We went to Mass every single day of the school year. It’s just what we did.
Looking back, Catholicism posed more questions than it ever was willing to answer; honestly, I believe it was set up that way from the beginning. Who, after all, could wrap his head around the idea of the Trinity, three Gods in one? Or an Immaculate Conception?
Tenets like that ought to have offered challenges but provided, instead, comfort. Maybe it was our youth, maybe it was the time of year, Easter on the horizon and serious Lent clamping down, rigid.
For whatever reason, as I stood there in the grocery store, unable to find a single solitary packet of meatloaf seasoning on my third stop of the day, I remembered something a noted writer penned about the luckless Rolling Stones in the wake of the Altamont disaster.
“If something can happen only to you,” he wrote, “you must be doing something to help it along.”
Amen to that and peace be with you as you savor some meatloaf.