Of Pigs and Pork
My friend Nadav is probably the only person who can truly understand the wave of emotion I experienced as I spied the 1956 edition of Meat from Ranch to Table tucked in Evany’s bookcase a few days ago. During the Hits.org years, he found this piece of meat industry propaganda (packaged just for kids!) among several boxes of tattered library books that a school was giving away. We brought it back to the office with us where it took its rightful place among the other treasured Webmonkey relics, like the shriveled-up eggplant named Renee that thau! was so fond of sending anonymously to unsuspecting co-workers. Somehow, Renee always found her way back home, but we thought for years that the book had been lost in the great exodus that ensued after a certain East Coast search engine company acquired ours. It turns out, though, that while Nadav and I were reminiscing about the good times we had with Meat from Ranch to Table, Evany had pulled it from the slow-burning metaphorical ashes of what was once our workplace, and has been carefully guarding it ever since.
I can’t speak for Nadav, but I loved that book because it reminded me of another I had as a kid. I paid $5.95 at Main Street Feed for Small-Scale Pig Raising by Dirk van Loon (still five stars on Amazon!). That was back when I was ten and embarking on my first career as a pig farmer. After that came babysitter, marijuana plant hydrater (which didn’t last long once my parents found out), biscuit maker, drive-thru queen, copy store clerk, AV technician, journalist, and eventually Web consultant and aspiring filmmaker. I can’t remember where I got the money to pay for the book, but my folks fronted me $100 to purchase two red Durocs whom--after a few days of careful observation--I named Trouble, after her ability to sniff it out with her snout, and Ignatowski, after Reverend Jim on Taxi. I think I just liked the way that name felt when I said it. A couple years later I also had a pig named Woodrow Wilson, and I am pretty sure there would have been a Calvin Coolidge and probably a Herbert Hoover if I had stayed in the hog business long enough. (Boy, for a period there, America sure seemed to be swayed by the alliterative candidates.)
On most days I would come home after school, grab my pig cane, and earnestly run them around the yard with the hope they would develop huge but not overly muscular hams. A nice big juicy butt would earn us high marks in the judging when it came fair time. Iggy and Trouble would snort and hop around when I let them out of their pen. Sometimes they would chase butterflies or the chickens. I often struggled to pull them with my cane from their determined rooting in my mom’s flowerbeds. And on days when it was hot and they couldn’t find any mud close by, they’d shade up under an apple tree, and I’d lie down with them and wait for a breeze. Just me and my pigs and all that pastoral pleasantness.
How could Iggy and Trouble have possibly known then that come August I would sell them out for cute school clothes and another chance at the big money the following year? Someday, when I’m feeling up to it, maybe I’ll tell you about the day we Windbiglers had to part with Trouble. All I’ll say now is...it wasn’t pretty.
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