A Rarefied Toast to my Father

My parents met and dated during the Great Depression, although on a side street in Hollywood, my mother’s only abject suffering boiled down to having to share nylon stockings with her younger sisters. Her father was the vice-president of the Cudahy Meat Packing Company in Los Angeles; no one in the Roberts clan ever went to bed hungry.

Meanwhile, Catherine was my father’s favorite girlfriend. After a night dancing at the Ambassador Hotel, he would drive her home, saunter into her mother’s kitchen, and fry himself a steak at one or two o’clock in the morning. Daddy often told the story that clearly he’d married Mama “for her meat.”

My Pasadena, California parents enjoyed one of those utterly content, and beyond that, actually happy, compatible companionships that endured for nearly fifty years before my mother died, leaving my father grief-stricken, suddenly bereft of his very best friend. As a family, whenever we had closed the car doors and headed for any destination, there they had been one step ahead of or behind me—holding hands.

But there was one time of year, every year, my father later confessed, when he had seriously considered renting a motel room to escape his better half’s insanity—from December 22 until December 26 when she morphed from Doris Day into the Dark Side of Martha Stewart, obsessive over the trappings and wrappings of the season. He would simply vanish, so went his fantasy, and be back in plenty of time to help assemble our Rose Parade folding chairs on New Year’s Eve. When I asked him, then, why he’d hung in there through those holidays, his answer? “The Christmas meat.”

My father’s self-made business had been inspired and catapulted into existence by a barrel of salad oil donated by his father-in-law during one of those nights at the Berendo Street stove over a rare New York Strip. was Glen-Webb & Co, or for short, Glencoe, was a food distributorship later assumed by Sysco Corporation during one of their first acquisitions in the 1970’s. And the meat goes on…

But I was not the daughter of this Daddy’s dreams. I was genetically spawned from Jack Sprat who could eat no fat while my father abhorred lean. I had dibs on the prime rib's “end cut;" it had to be well done or I wasn’t doing it. On his plate, whatever it was, as they say, was still mooing.

On my first date, age seven—your mother makes you go because Andy’s parents invited you and they are very nice—I remember being in a restaurant for dinner, but the entire day before at the amusement park and any encounter thereafter with Andy have been wiped from my mental screen. No doubt I could submit to trendy hypnosis and recover memory, but based on what I can recall of the meal, I’ll pass.

Andy’s mother was one of those people who think you should eat your entire beef entrée and the inch-thick strip of bubbling lard that used to adhere to the side of a sirloin. An otherwise ordinary woman as far as I could tell, she considered this criminal crème-de-la-crème to be “the best part of the beast.” Had she been the one to whisper, “I do” to my father they would have waged knives and forks.

“Eat your fat, Kathleen,” she ordered as her arms spanned the diameter of the upholstered round booth and her utensils started sawing at the beast’s slippery perimeter on my plate. “It’ll make your hair shiny.” My mother used Bandoline, a wicked precursor to later-formulated gentler gel on me: I was most definitely shiny enough.

I was the little girl who had, from birth, trimmed fat off everything. Whenever I acquiesced to ingesting a few small bites of any beef, I scissored with such precision that my grandmother said I should have been a surgeon. My beady pupils could telescopically zoom in on a slice of meat and discover gristle invisible to the naked eye.

I was not going to live through dinner, and there was only one thing to do: call Mama. I smiled and excused myself to go to the ladies’ room, wrapping my cardigan around my gooseflesh against the deep-freeze of the air conditioning combined with the accompanying blood pressure plunge of high anxiety. I shivered all the way to the pay phone next to the bathrooms where I started to uncontrollably shake. I was having a full-on panic attack.

I barely completed the collect call she had rehearsed with me from the time I could babble. I was sobbing as I blubbered about the heinous torturer who was Andy’s mother, “and don’t put my meat-eating father on the phone!” I commanded. When she heard my reason for the call, her compassion turned to exasperation.

“Oh Lord, go back to the table and hide it under the potato! Do something, anything, only calm down. Do you want to talk to your father?”

I retraced my steps with confidence and proceeded to groan and moan about how delicious my steak was while stashing anything pink or red and greasy fat blobs under the shelf of my baked potato.

As an older child, I was not appreciative of my father’s meaty achievements, nor did “what Daddy brought home from the office” thrill me. While my peers were raking in ballpoint pens and desk tablets, I was staring into the great plunder of raw carnivore cache whenever I searched for ice cream in our garage freezer. Big ugly hunks of it, frozen filets of it, round pre-cooked roasts of it filled every shelf. I could almost hear it breathing as the cold pulsed from between the cracks of various cuts. On Saturday, he would invite me to taste some blood-dripping morsel he’d concocted into “soup” or “stew.” His bride shook her head in disdain; his first-born daughter craved lean store-bought hamburger. He was a man alone in this meat thing—until Christmas dinner when the traditional roast would be enjoyed by the entire extended Irish family—some twenty-five of us grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who would gather to celebrate the birth of Christ, and for our agnostic patriarch, the bovine bounty.

By the time the cocktail hour arrived on Christmas night at our house, all the gifts had been well-received, the trash bags were filled to the brim with papers and ribbons smashed in as tightly as my older brother could stomp on them, and Mama needed a couple of Tangueray martinis to soothe sore ribbon-tying fingers. As the dinner hour ran later and later, spirits ran higher and higher.

Occasionally this would lead to further trouble, like the holiday the cattle connoisseur had an attack of what he called “per-plexia” following a few jiggers of rum. Seems my aunt Eileen had brought her childhood friend to dinner. Pierre, whose sister named France had not been feeling well and therefore had elected to rest at home, whereupon Eileen suggested to Pierre that he take some of the leftover meat to her.

My father’s ears perked up from clear across the room behind the bar that he had been vigilantly tending, although he’d always claimed he was hard of hearing in a crowd.

“What was that?” his eyebrows raised in panic.

“PIERRE IS GOING TO TAKE THE MEAT TO FRANCE!” Eileen cupped her hands and bellowed.

On Dancer, on Comet, on Donner, on Blitzen—Daddy Dasher to the kitchen, knocking aside Pierre like a rag doll in what he thought was the roast-race, my mother in hot pursuit, fearful that he might disturb the juicy slumber of the now resting, ready-to-carve prime rib.

When I threw open the swinging kitchen door to see from whence arose such a clatter, what could be the matter, I first noticed my cousin Christopher drinking the butter-sherry sauce meant to top the dessert cranberry pudding, right from the saucepan on the stove (he’d had a few beers, alright) and then my eyes swept the room, past the carving knife that lay flat on the floor. There they were, my mother stooped down behind my father, her fingers roving the inseam of his seasonal red-and-green-plaid slacks. Her exasperated voice raised several octaves.

“Come on Bill, where is it?”

She looked up to catch me, an innocent witness to this altogether uncompromising parental position.

“What are you doing?” I asked in horror.

Christopher whipped his head in my direction, certain he’d been caught red-handed, as the woman who bore me peered around my father’s waistband while he popped a slice of prime into his mouth.

“I’m trying to get to the meat.”

Recently, while penning my father’s requested newspaper obituary—“in lieu of flowers, donations or even a memorial, raise a glass to Bill”— I considered the unexpressed, the sense of adventure and playfulness he’d contributed to my upbringing. Engaged in the balancing act between them, I’d often tipped towards my mother’s cautioning. I pulled the cork from a dark Cabernet and intentionally undercooked the farm-raised Montana tenderloin tribute I’d planned for dinner.

As I lifted the fork to my mouth with one hand, I raised my glass with the other.

“Here’s to my father, for the life he gave me,” I announced with uncharacteristic aplomb to my husband and our German Shepherds as I threw caution to the rarified wind in my soul and began to chew.

It was divine.