"PorkChop"

PorkChop: Or the Unlikely Metaphor of my Spirit's Survival Jay certainly had a way of making me smile. He was chuckling, sitting on my couch and telling me about the time when his new woman had collected all the gifts of other women, he had kept in his apartment. I could see him, following in obedience to this new lover's Latin-American temperament, garbage bag in eager hands, as she tossed the pictures, the presents, and that ugly tree bark Susan had given him to remind him of her love for nature. Sure shot that one must have been, and even today Jay sat there, thirty years after the garbage truck had picked up the remains of his love life before Susan, and he sparkled. I smiled. I smiled with the desperation of a trapped animal that seeks to change the mind of its predator. Jay was not the hunter. He was simply the bearer of the news of survival today. I knew he had been busy with his many and sundry matters, as he calls them, on this Sunday. But three cell phone rings had summoned him to my door. And he sat there, keenly aware of my pain and fear, telling me those stories about his loves gone wrong. And I smiled. He let me talk, as friends do when there really is not much to say to a person who is hurting. After I had repeated the minutest details of the relationship trouble to the point that even I could not listen to my thoughts one more round, we agreed on pork chops as the metaphor for this relationship gone wrong. I am a vegetarian, so porkchops had a lot of greasy, shuddering meaning for me. But it was porkchops that he had wanted on the day before he left me. There is not much more appalling to me than the memory of those damned pork chops, coagolating grease a lacey fringe to their existence in the pan. He never ate them. He did speak about ten words to me on that day before he left. Five of them were items for my grocery list. Two he had uttered in response to my question what he wanted for dinner. In retrospect it was his last meal before his desire for a sort of freedom took him away. The other three words had been in his greeting after coming home. Yet, he had never really wanted to come home. This had been the place where I swung frying pans with fury against my fears of not pleasing his palate and him. This morning, I had used the the frying pan like an ill-placed exclamation point to my expressions of frustration. It certainly made my points, and they were noisy. But the noise my frying pan armor made did not intimidate the monsters that haunted him. They did not wake up the warrior in him. I did not follow him with garbage bag in eager hands through the house but that was only because he did not want to toss out old memories, mine or his. His was not a temperament fileld with emotion and passion. He strategy was to hold still against the attacks, mine and those inside of him. So Jay and I decided that porkchops summed it up nicely. And after Jay kissed me good bye on the cheek, I threw the porkchops in the garbage. I could not stop the bittersweet smile that crept like a little thief from deep inside me, scrambled carelessly over the debris of my broken spirit, and lifted up the corners of my lips with curiosity. Jay, my friend, certainly had a way of making me smile. -Gabriele Strohschen

[Back]