The Family Pig—A Terrible Idea
As a Navy kid, I moved 23 times by the time I was 18. We usually lived in towns, to be close to Dad's work, but both my parents were country-born and whenever possible, my mom kept chickens and grew an organic garden. She sometimes canned things when she couldn’t figure out what else to do with them. When Dad retired from the Navy, we spent three memorable years in a small town in Texas, where my dad bought three calves and raised them, my sister had a mare with a nasty, sneaky disposition and a fondness for mesquite trees and Mom named and then fell in love with, a hairy pink pig named Porkchop.
I suspect buying a weaner at a stock auction was my father’s idea. He ran the dining services at a college in Stephenville, Texas. In the ‘70’s, when no one in Texas ever considered separating organics and recyclables, Dad convinced the students to throw their leftover food into a special garbage can. He brought the waste food home and Porkchop happily recycled it. Single processed-cheese-slice wrappers always made their way into the bin, and for some reason, they were Porkchop’s favorite comestible. He seemed to like the crackle of the cellophane.
Porkchop, already a sizable beast, disliked my dad heartily, but Dad fed him every day, in a process ranging somewhere between jousting and mud-wrestling. It went like this:
Step 1: Dad drives his green Ford pickup with the slop can down to Porkchop’s pen. He straddles the fence, reaching with a shovel to throw food into the trough.
Step 2: Porkchop notices Dad and rushes the fence. He attempts to bite Dad on the leg. His teeth are large, broad and snaggly; their yellowed enamel, the maw of a hippopotamus. He roars fiercely, putting his several-hundred pounds into motion and arrives at the fence, jaws agape.
Step 3: Dad yells at Porkchop, who lunges at his leg. Dad swings the leg back to the safe side of the fence, pulls the shovel back and clocks Porkchop on the head. It’s like dropping a dessert fork on a cement floor. While the pig briefly recoils in mild annoyance, Dad swings the shovel back to the garbage can and throws in another load of slops. Porkchop readies his next attack. Dad readies his next defense and hurls another shovel load of food into the feeder before the next mad-pig rush at his Levi-ed calf.
Step 4. Repeat until can of slops is empty and trough is full.
As much as Porkchop hated Dad, he adored my mother. When Mom visited him down at the pigpen, Porkchop thrust his snout through the fence, emitting small, gentle grunts of greeting and admiration. Mom scratched between his ears and the pig rolled his eyes with joy. She talked to him and he listened, I swear he did. They spoke each other's language, that pig and my mom.
But porcine idylls cannot last forever. The day came when Porkchop would realize his destiny, and Dad was just as glad. The conversion of Porkchop to eponymous foodstuffs meant one less obstacle between Dad and his nightly newspaper. Perhaps he would even keep his leg intact. But Mom was distraught, a traitor on the run. On the Big Day, the slaughter was slated for the farm: that vicious, thousand-pound hog was not going to be loaded onto a truck, no way, no how, as they say in the South. Our family fled: at daybreak, the car was packed and the four of us—Mom, Dad, my sister and I—drove away to visit cousins for a day and a night. Mom was crying.
When we returned, our pig was nothing more than a series of heavy packages wrapped in white paper, filling the farm-sized freezer my parents had bought when they conceived the plan of raising their own pork. And we ate him; we did. But we paid the price in guilt, in my mother’s pain and my father’s grim satisfaction. We never had another pig.
As a Navy kid, I moved 23 times by the time I was 18. We usually lived in towns, to be close to Dad's work, but both my parents were country-born and whenever possible, my mom kept chickens and grew an organic garden. She sometimes canned things when she couldn’t figure out what else to do with them. When Dad retired from the Navy, we spent three memorable years in a small town in Texas, where my dad bought three calves and raised them, my sister had a mare with a nasty, sneaky disposition and a fondness for mesquite trees and Mom named and then fell in love with, a hairy pink pig named Porkchop.
I suspect buying a weaner at a stock auction was my father’s idea. He ran the dining services at a college in Stephenville, Texas. In the ‘70’s, when no one in Texas ever considered separating organics and recyclables, Dad convinced the students to throw their leftover food into a special garbage can. He brought the waste food home and Porkchop happily recycled it. Single processed-cheese-slice wrappers always made their way into the bin, and for some reason, they were Porkchop’s favorite comestible. He seemed to like the crackle of the cellophane.
Porkchop, already a sizable beast, disliked my dad heartily, but Dad fed him every day, in a process ranging somewhere between jousting and mud-wrestling. It went like this:
Step 1: Dad drives his green Ford pickup with the slop can down to Porkchop’s pen. He straddles the fence, reaching with a shovel to throw food into the trough.
Step 2: Porkchop notices Dad and rushes the fence. He attempts to bite Dad on the leg. His teeth are large, broad and snaggly; their yellowed enamel, the maw of a hippopotamus. He roars fiercely, putting his several-hundred pounds into motion and arrives at the fence, jaws agape.
Step 3: Dad yells at Porkchop, who lunges at his leg. Dad swings the leg back to the safe side of the fence, pulls the shovel back and clocks Porkchop on the head. It’s like dropping a dessert fork on a cement floor. While the pig briefly recoils in mild annoyance, Dad swings the shovel back to the garbage can and throws in another load of slops. Porkchop readies his next attack. Dad readies his next defense and hurls another shovel load of food into the feeder before the next mad-pig rush at his Levi-ed calf.
Step 4. Repeat until can of slops is empty and trough is full.
As much as Porkchop hated Dad, he adored my mother. When Mom visited him down at the pigpen, Porkchop thrust his snout through the fence, emitting small, gentle grunts of greeting and admiration. Mom scratched between his ears and the pig rolled his eyes with joy. She talked to him and he listened, I swear he did. They spoke each other's language, that pig and my mom.
But porcine idylls cannot last forever. The day came when Porkchop would realize his destiny, and Dad was just as glad. The conversion of Porkchop to eponymous foodstuffs meant one less obstacle between Dad and his nightly newspaper. Perhaps he would even keep his leg intact. But Mom was distraught, a traitor on the run. On the Big Day, the slaughter was slated for the farm: that vicious, thousand-pound hog was not going to be loaded onto a truck, no way, no how, as they say in the South. Our family fled: at daybreak, the car was packed and the four of us—Mom, Dad, my sister and I—drove away to visit cousins for a day and a night. Mom was crying.
When we returned, our pig was nothing more than a series of heavy packages wrapped in white paper, filling the farm-sized freezer my parents had bought when they conceived the plan of raising their own pork. And we ate him; we did. But we paid the price in guilt, in my mother’s pain and my father’s grim satisfaction. We never had another pig.