Liver & Onions

London from Peace on Fifth. Yes, that's right my last name is my business because I married the business nearly 18 months ago. Peace on Fifth is located at 508 East Fifth Street in the Oregon District, Dayton OH. The focus of the store is compassion to planet, animals, people and self. Every thing offered in the store is eco friendly, made without animal testing or destruction of animal habitat, no slave or forced labor and go for you stuff. We active support and participate in actions to end human trafficking and build awareness of human trafficking and exploitation locally and abroad.  Thank you.

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There is a great coursing through my veins of dust.  This red and copper dust has filled my arteries and lies in wait for some lubrication and some liquefying.  This dust still pushes forward with the rap of my heart blowing high pressured air, heat and will to move this dust along. As I meet my block, my writing joints atrophied, I wait until a word conjures up synovial fluid and I am in the word.

Liver. 

This is my word.  This is the image.  This is impression that has been sitting on the stoop waiting for me to say hello.  Liver just sits there and has been for years as a gastronomical fossil and not one that I am the least bit concerned with, or so I think.  But it sits there on the southern porch of my childhood, in the Texas sun, chewing tobacco and watching the sunset.  Whatever it means I have no true desire to investigation because I don’t have an affectionate relationship with liver and as I recall, and I do recall, liver was never quite friendly, in fact liver was one of the more difficult memories for me to stomach.  But liver sits there, on the porch chewin’ tobaccy. 

If liver had a theme song or a movie, I have no idea what it would be.  My theme song would be How let the Dogs out by the Baha Men as I always feel like I am running around my house, my life, my relationships like a wild and crazed dog.  Even as I write this I have no idea where the keys to me house are.  Liver, I think would have a theme movie, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, the 1966 Spaghetti western outside of the plot or the themes, but the title.  Liver looks, is and tastes good, bad and ugly. The color of liver is dense and wonderful and what I have the most tolerable history with.  Glorious dark rich tones of purple and black that are full and sweeping, reminding me of gorgeous eggplant, exotic toenail polish, and stacks of deep near chocolate colored jewel tones sweaters in department stores.  I think of liver, with its lack of marble, as coming from some spectacular animal, a mythical animal and its gorgeous flesh tastes horrible as a punishment for killing it for food. 

So maybe Liver has something to say.  Maybe I should sit for a visit and see why this piece of meat is calling me maybe. I don’t think that I can truly remember that last time that I had liver.

As a vegetarian off and on for more than 20 years, it is not often that I reflect on food from my childhood, food that was full of Texan grown grass feed beef.  There was steak and home fries for breakfast, hamburgers for lunch and sirloin for dinner.  There were times when having roast beef or other yumminess ladled with onions and cheese, or barbeque sauce coat the recollections of the fare of my youth, and I view these memories fondly, but don’t miss the beef.  Tucked away in those memories is also the memory of liver.  Liver, who by its mere existence seemed a punishment and for dinner, must absolutely be a penance for sins that my mother was determined to torture out of me.  It surprises me now how much I confessed at the dinner table, hoping that a far worse punishment (not eating liver, heehee) would be warranted if only she knew of my crimes. 

My mother used to make liver and crispy onions for dinner at least once a month.  You always knew it was liver time because there was a feverish hunting for the A1 sauce by my father.  The process would start with the pounding of the liver, the flouring of the liver and the panfrying of the liver.  The process would finish with the frying of the onions.  The juxtaposition of the sweet Vidalia fried onions next to the breaded fried liver, gross.  The cover charge for leaving the table was at least three bites.  I scooted the meat around the plate, cutting off finger nail sized pieces that I covered with a tiara of crispy onions before I mustered the eating.  Finally relieved that I had tackled that huge huge huge bite, I would look down with pride only to see that no matter the size I ate, a larger piece of meat would regenerate in its place.  “You can’t leave this table until you eat your liver.” Ugghhh.

Knitted into my memories of eating liver and onions is the time in the kitchen with my mother.  My mother was a professional and while it is also true today that many women are professional my mother cooked dinner every night.  During the cooking of dinner most times, the kitchen was abuzz with salad, dessert, the main meal, but not so on liver night.  Just to make sure there was plenty of room.  Liver night meant liver and onions.  With a simpler meal, this meant that I could talk or more often than not, listen to my mother.  Liver in some regard held that coveted space in my mother’s life called time. I really go to see my mother and know her.  Know her not as a great woman, but as a human as a person who struggled with watching her beloved father getting old and more dependent  even as she demanded that he move in with us.  I got to see her not as a super woman but as a woman who defined herself by being productive as a mother, helpful to others and resourceful in her community. I got to see her making dinner in a candy apple red strapless dress with hair gloriously coiffed as she finished dinner before the babysitter came and then ran out on date night with my dad (yes, that night she made liver). 

While my father taught me fun things like chemical reactions and the value of well-placed fresh garlic my mother was very different in her method of education, teaching and sharing her values and ideas about the world.  She shared things like a supreme need for gratitude for this country in all its glory and freedom and that one of the greatest freedoms is to eat. Knowing that we had the privilege of eating was always something that she encouraged me to understand so I was never allowed to complain about liver and onions. 

As geographical distance and life moves my mother further and further away from my every day, I am more aware that I miss her.  I am thinking more of those little hidden lessons that I hope I have not forgotten to teach and show my own child. I think of my own child now, who has never had liver and onions.  The food of his youth is nice and pretty, so formulated to always taste the same.  He doesn’t have the pleasure of suffering through liver and onions, but he has been able to sit with me in the kitchen as I make veggie burgers, which he hates, and talk.  As I look at him, I feel for him that he and his friends will spend more time learning about the world in the vacuum of youth from their contemporaries and not from those who live it and struggle with it daily.  Does my son even know me?  Not the archetype of a mother, but me as fallible human and daily beggar of grace.  I struggle with the notion that what I am doing to simply easier and better for him, for me.  In the course of eating myself that line, I have also erased the line of communication, tactile communication that I never acknowledged my mother had with me. 

Food in our country has become a reticent and discreet, potentially unintentional way to strip us from our families and from developing culture and compassion for others.  In part because we are so removed from the preparation of what we make.  Kraft and Green Giant are replacing time with convenience and by doing so they are making convenience more valuable than time.  There is great fear that our food won’t be perfect and that we may be forced to eat something “good for us” but, heaven forbid that it not taste good.  We teach and encourage our children to think that all food should taste sweet, good, uniform.  How much have we missed trying to make sure that our kids are so pampered with the food that they eat; have we forgotten to have special conversations in the kitchen with them? Should we go back to making telephones from soup cans to stay connected and IN each other’s space?  When do you get to know, really know your kids?   When did you get to know, really know your parents?

So Liver is still sitting on the porch.  Just sittin’. I want to ask, what this little adventure is about.  I want to ask if my rantings are enough to get off the porch and to give me a piece of his mind.  But nothing.

I am immensely grateful that I have had burnt toast and a black pancake, that I have had some crazy “I found this recipe in a magazine” dish and that I have had liver and onions.  The older I get the more I can see how it has made me tougher and more resilient than I always happen to believe I am.  I wish this and much more for my child and for the children in your life, through blood, address or marriage.  Our desire to give our children gourmet food with no mistakes and to not challenge what they eat may leave us with children that we’re less connected to than the connection that we have to our own parents.  In many ways liver and onions represents to me the legacy that my mother gave me that sometimes you just have to eat something because it is good for you not that you like it.  Some decisions are tough in the world, tougher than eating liver and onions.