Belly Was Young Once, And Callow

A baking sheet, mottled black and brown, lies on the counter beside the stove top. It was never destined for the theatrics of a star restaurant, the knowing hands of a celebrity chef. Its fate was that of a journeyman. This sheet had made its way from an anonymous mill of decades past to the kitchen of my maternal grandmother, herself decades gone from this world. Fate of inheritance landed the sheet in my kitchen, also decades gone.

The sheet is warped. Creases mar the bottom. Little canyons formed years ago, by thoughtlessness and a knife used to divide up some dish long forgotten. That its memory cannot be dredged up is testament to the mediocrity that must have clung to it. This is not surprising. Many years ago the belly was rapacious without commensurate sophistication. It ate with gusto and without much thought. "Fill me!" was its ceaseless demand. This greed carried with it a certain blindness to history, taste, and respect.

Respect. The word settles in the pit of this belly which hangs chastened and wiser now. The naive palate of the past has evolved into something much more discriminating. Discriminating, and rueful. It cannot eat as a youth anymore. Such actions verge on abuse, leaving mild regret at best and acid attacks on the gullet at worst. The belly is much more careful in the thick of middle age. It has to be. Respect is often as necessary to the act of cooking and eating as the addition of salt and curiosity.

Hunger is here. It is the wolf that sits in front of my spine as I prepare the pot of clam chowder that had entertained my thoughts most of the afternoon. Hunger for that chowder had indirectly led to my use of the baking sheet for my dinner. This because my imagination had been seized by the idea of cornbread as companion to the fruits of my labor at the pot. It was upon a rack resting on the sheet that I would turn out my cornbread after its retrieval from the depths of the oven.

I could not help but think of my blindness to respect as I consider the baking sheet in the white gold light of a early spring evening. The round of cornbread lay resting. In one hand was a serrated knife, on the counter a milk-white plate emblazoned with a large rectangle of Irish butter. My other hand tugged at my lip while the bread cooled. The canyons in the sheet stood out, highlighted by my regret at having marred this humble pan that carried with it the ghost of my grandmother. I struggled to recall why I thought those many years ago that it was okay to cut something out of that pan with a sharp knife, desecrating the pan and inflicting insult on the knife all the while.

The pan, and its twin ensconced in the cabinet by the stove, had been with me for years. Through marriage, divorce, two broken relationships, these humble sheet metal artifacts gave me a constant I did not know I had. And I had never apologized for the day that knife scraped its way across the metal.  Warm against the flat of my hand it brought my grandmother back into my heart, her shade into the kitchen. I cut the bread, careful of the rack and pan. I bowed my head as the butter phased into liquid gold. It was then, basking in the blessing of humble nourishment, that I repented, hoping my grandmother forgave me for the thoughtless youth that had been, and his callowness in the kitchen.