Liver & Onions - Chapter 4

Chapter 4 | Liver and Onions

On nights when Leah and Amos have to go out, they occasionally ask me to sit with Fannie, Leah’s ninety-nine-year-old mother, just to be there in case something happens. I’m nine years old and still living with Mom at Woodland, so it gives me something to do. There are no cell phones so I’m not sure exactly what I would have done if something did happen (like she keel over and die), but I don’t mind. I usually just sit in the living room and watch TV and Fannie sits by me and faces the other direction and pretends not to watch with me. As a thank-you, Leah and Amos usually bring me home a McDLT from McDonald’s, which is the best thing a person can ever put in their mouth. The hot side stays hot and the cold side stays cold, and it makes a difference.

I think this is the last year I ever eat a lima bean. It happened at Jake and Ruth’s, and it was so bad that I still remember it. All beans are gross and limas are the worst, and a top-five worst food ever, and I’ve tried some pretty scary stuff.

In Lancaster, people eat almost anything. You can order Liver-and-Onions off of the menu at restaurants, and Scrapple - which is exactly what it sounds like: scraps of discarded meat shoveled from the floor of the butcher shop and thrown in a deep frier and then put on a plate, sizzling and greasy. Amos worked in a butcher shop when he was young and reminisced about how good fresh scrapple is. “You haven’t lived until you’ve had fresh scrapple,” he’d say.

Leah sometimes makes stuffed pig stomach, which is cow meat cooked inside of a pig’s actual stomach. Then the stomach is served on a plate and you slice it open to get all of that yummy cow meat out of it.

One of Dad’s favorite snacks is tripe, which is basically any farm animal’s stomach soaked in pickle juice. He likes his cow tongue this way too. He also likes clams and oysters, which seem to me like phlegm, and if you drive down to Baltimore Inner-Harbor, which is less than an hour from Lancaster, you can get clams big enough that you have to cut them with a steak knife and it’s as gross as you are thinking right now, but it makes Dad happy. He eats anchovies straight out of the tin, and if he orders a pizza with half-anchovies the anchovy juice spreads all over everything and ruins the whole pizza. He also likes hearts, chicken hearts to be exact. When Jane makes a chicken dish she fries up the hearts for Dad as a special treat. This is sometimes served with her dandelion soup, which is exactly what it sounds like - dandelions picked from the backyard and put into a cauldron, with spells and such.

But nothing is worse than liver, and sometimes Lancaster people just cook liver by itself, on purpose. Not liver and something else like at the restaurants, just liver - hot on a plate and ready to eat. It is so gross that I actually built up a radar for it and can taste or smell it a mile away. If a piece of meat or something else has been within ten feet of the liver I immediately check out.

My top five worst (never eat) foods are:

Liver

Tongue

Scrapple

Beans (kidney)

Beans (other)

I didn’t include hearts in the list because they shouldn’t even be an option. They are not a food, and neither is brains. And stomach doesn’t count either, even if it is stuffed with something else.

I usually wake up hungry, especially after a nap. It happens in the evening too, after I’ve passed out on the couch with the TV on. Something will stir me awake, either that or Jennifer or Sadie-Claire will get frustrated with my snoring and tell me to go upstairs, but before I do, I stand in the kitchen and eat some food because everyone knows that a few hundred calories, or a thousand, is really healthy right before bed. Meringue cookies are always a favorite, or dark pretzels dipped in mayonnaise, or a brick of graham crackers.

Mayonnaise has always been important to me and anything other than Hellman’s is unacceptable. I feel this way about Heinz ketchup too - Hellman’s and Heinz should be in charge of the mayo and ketchup from here on out and restaurants shouldn’t be allowed to serve anything else. There should be government oversight on this. I get fussy when I go to a local place and order a burger and find out they make their own special ketchup in-house. What a waste of time.

When I was young, pretzels or lettuce dipped in mayo was our nighttime snack, unless we were in the mood for sweet and then it was a brick of graham crackers broken up into a bowl with some milk, eaten with a spoon, like breakfast cereal, or pop tarts, or Cracklin’ Oat Bran which looks so much like dog food that Mom and I just start calling it that.

“I’m getting a snack, do you want anything from the kitchen?”

“Uuuuh, yeah. Bring me a bowl of dog food, please.”

My New Year’s resolution this year is not to eat anything standing up. I came to this decision by evaluating my caloric intake and realizing that at least half of all I consume happens when I am grazing upright in our kitchen or someone else’s. We have an island in our kitchen right beside the pantry, so I usually grab a bag of something processed and dock myself there for a while and eat like it’s my last meal, and this needs to change. So far I’ve stuck to it pretty well, (except for when I eat a banana, sitting and eating a banana just feels stupid, so with bananas I get a pass.)

Old habits die hard and so this will be a process. Just yesterday I ate two hard-boiled eggs sprinkled with salt and pepper, some pretzels, and some seasoned almonds, all before I even realized that I wasn’t sitting down. I wasn’t planning to eat at all yesterday because Carly and Justin were taking us to a fancy steak restaurant for dinner and when this happens I try not to eat breakfast or lunch so that I’m hungry enough to eat my whole steak. Yesterday I forgot, but I still ate the whole steak because I’m American.

When I eat too much red meat I get the meatsweats, which would be a really good name for a band and it’s what we’re calling our little foursome that goes to the fancy steak places. The Meatsweats have had a couple of gigs in the past few months and each time it’s been a lovely meal followed by a day of regret and a handful of Tums. It’s worth it though, because our bandmates, Carly and Justin, are fun and funny, and we laugh a lot.

Last night our waiter, Andrew was his name, told us most of his life story before we even ordered, and by the end of the evening, he was buying us things that we didn’t even want because we had to try them. He did his best to talk me into the wedge salad but I pushed back because it seems silly to order a head of lettuce with a grape tomato and some blue cheese when I could buy it at Publix for less than a dollar. Andrew insisted that this wedge was different and he gave me one for free. I’ll admit, it was special. The house-made steak sauce, however, tasted like gasoline, but Andrew redeemed himself with the white chocolate cheesecake.

I think the cheesecake may have had something weird in it though because when I got home I started to have the strange reaction that I do to certain foods where my face gets really itchy and starts to come off in little yellow flakes. It’s not as gross as it sounds, it’s just really annoying, and then I have to slop hydrocortisone cream on my beard to get it to calm down. These are the things you endure as a member of the Meatsweats. It’s not for everyone, but I wouldn’t give up this band for anything.

We first met Carly and Justin when our kids were young and went to the same dance studio in Franklin. Those were the days when Sadie-Claire would be the best in her class and learn all of the dances by heart and we’d buy all of the costumes for the performance, but then we’d show up the day of the recital and she would refuse to go on stage. Thankfully, she grew out of that (sort of).

Carly and Justin and the kids moved away around the same time we moved out to California, but we stayed connected as best as we could even across the country. Our three boys grew up liking German engineering as much as Justin and I do, so it’s been fun helping them buy their first cars - their oldest son drives a Mercedes and our two younger boys both drive Mini Coopers, and we all send each other pictures of cool cars we want to buy. The first car I can remember Dad driving is his early ‘70s green Corvette Stingray with the T-top and the hidden headlights (the one that overheated on the way to Hershey Park). Amos drives a Peugeot back then but it is hard to keep out of the shop so he trades it for a flesh-colored Mercedes Diesel. Step-dad Dave drives a baby-blue drop-top Beetle and Mom has an Opal Manta and then an Alfa-Romeo. Everywhere I go is in a cool car, except for when I am with Jane - she drives a white Ford Fairmont that looks like a toaster oven on wheels.

Dad eventually sells his car because he is driving demos from the dealerships and Mom is given company cars from her boss, so she buys herself a candy apple red convertible Camaro to drive on the weekends. When I turn sixteen she lets me drive it whenever I want. Dad is cool about me borrowing the cars he brings home from the dealership to show me, and I feel like a big shot cruising through Quarryville in a Porsche 928gts or a Delorian. Now I realize I probably looked like a punk trying to look cooler than I was (accurate).

Not long after Jennifer and I bought our first house I traded in my Nissan Sentra for a Chrysler Sebring and I couldn’t have been happier driving it around the backroads of Franklin with the top down working on my tan. I eventually traded the Chrysler in on a VW Beetle, and when royalties started coming in I gave it to Jennifer‘s mom as a gift for giving me the idea to write the song about the fish. Then I bought another Beetle and drove it until we had kids and realized that Beetles and car seats don’t mix, so I bought a Mercedes SUV that Jennifer quickly stole from me, so I was stuck with the minivan we’d bought for her. She hated that van the day we brought it home and she vowed to never own one ever again.

I wasn’t going to drive the ugly van either so I bought a Jeep and filled it with blankets and stocking caps so that I could keep the roof off for most of the year. My threshold for top-off weather is 50°, maybe a few degrees cooler if the sun is out and there’s not much breeze. When we lost our house and our savings after the flood, I had to sell the Jeep in all of the downsizings, but as soon as we moved to California I started browsing websites to see what convertibles were available. By that time Jennifer had learned that when I start looking at cars I’m going to end up buying one, so she told me to just get it over with and I bought my second favorite convertible of all time, a Mini Cooper Sidewalk edition with the fancy seats and the special interior.

Mini only manufactured a limited number of Sidewalks in 2008 and 2009, and less than 500 were imported to the US in each of those years, and I like having stuff that no one else has, so the car suited me well. I got so tan driving that car that people at church asked me what ethnicity I was. But the Mini was expensive to fix and after a few glorious years, in a rare and impulsive move of responsible practicality, I traded it in for a new Volkswagen. Dad indoctrinated in me young that new cars lose their value as soon as you drive them off the lot, so I always sort of stuck my nose up at people who stupidly spent their money on brand-new cars. Then I got a brand new car of my own I realized why people do it - it’s not just the smell.

When Jennifer’s Mercedes that she stole from me began to get high in miles we gave it to our friend Chuy who waited tables at the Mexican restaurant in our neighborhood, and Jennifer bought a VW Touareg. It was a great car with all sorts of gadgets but it had a crack in the dash that she just couldn’t look past so she sold it and leased a little Buick that we called The Bubble. Dave Ramsey says to never lease a car, but this was Jennifer‘s decision and I’m not the boss of her.

Dave and I have been friends since before he became the Dave Ramsey and I used to call him when I got a royalties check and didn’t know how to best handle the money. Dave often invited us to play music at his weekly staff chapel services, and over the years we got to see those meetings go from a dozen or so people in a conference room to an auditorium that more resembled a concert hall. During one of those chapels where Jennifer and I were playing some songs and sharing some stories, I said that most of Dave’s kingdom and all of his literature could pretty much be summed up in a pamphlet that says, “Make as much money as you can and don’t spend it all.” Jennifer shot me the I-can’t-believe-you-just-said-that look, but Dave got a kick out of it.

I’ve gotten that look from her a lot over the years, like when I told an audience about how when we took a shower together on our wedding night and Jennifer finally saw me naked, she pointed at me and laughed out loud because it looks like my stomach is being held up by an invisible belt. Like most of the men on the Esh side, the bulk of my body weight is on the top and is propped up by two toothpicks and a pelvis. She won’t like that I told that story here either, but she’s not the boss of me and I don’t think she reads my books anyways.

Last fall, before Carly, Justin, and the kids moved back to Tennessee, their son Wesley sent me a picture of a new Mini Cooper he was thinking about buying - a supercharged Sidewalk Edition in Pepper White, the best Mini Cooper color ever made. I told him how hard they are to find and that he absolutely had to buy it. Truth is, I was a little jealous that I couldn’t buy it for myself, but we were starting the non-profit and having trouble just making our monthly bills so I couldn’t even think about it, but I was happy for him nonetheless.

That weekend they drove down from Louisville to visit, and Wes had the car with him because the dealer agreed to let him test drive it for a few days. He wanted me to check it out, so after lunch, he and I sped it back to our house and I tried to convince him that he needed to figure out a way to come up with the money to get it. Then, while we were all standing in our kitchen, Carly got out some paperwork and I glanced at it curiously and said, “Carly, why is my name on that document?” She said, “Because the car is yours and God told me to buy it for you the minute I saw it.”

It took a few seconds for me to register what Carly just said and Jennifer and I looked at each other and the kids in stunned disbelief. I had no idea what to say so I just hugged her and cried. And even though Jennifer didn’t really get anything, she cried too, because she likes it when I’m happy. And my kids got to see what indulgent generosity looks like - four adults standing in our kitchen, laughing and crying and hugging and smiling. They got to see what it looks like when people keep moving forward, keep trusting, keep praying, and keep hoping. They know the things I like, and how much this meant to me, and that this had to have been God because of how very appropriate it is, and it did Carly’s heart good to know that given the choice of cars, I would have chosen this car, in this color, with this engine, over any others, and she had no idea about any of that when she first saw it.

Now that Carly and Justin are settled back in town, and the Meatsweats are back together, we’re dreaming and scheming about the future, and one of the schemes includes us opening a little car dealership here in Franklin. Carly wants a side hustle and Wes might want it to be his front hustle. Either way, Front-hustle is the name of the band we start next. Someone told me Liver and Onions are still playing music up in the northeast, opening up for Two Toothpicks and a Pelvis, but I’m still not buying their records.