Essays on the Tangible

Saturday Night at the Supper Club

 It’s Saturday Night at the Supper Club. Prime Rib Night. Ribs 6-12 from the fattened cow. Cooked slowly under dry heat in a savory coat of garlic, herbs, salt, and pepper. Served with a side of fatty jus. It is January 10th, rural Wisconsin. The snow blows sideways, The temperature hovers around zero degrees. An elderly couple gets into a slush stained white Toyota Camry after splitting a queen cut prime at 4PM. It turns over with a prolonged moan and ignites with a shriek. The serpentine belt squeals, and the wheels churn in place as the gentleman drives left out the parking lot into the darkness of County Road Y. The night is only lit up by the flashing red lights of the windmills, and the red OPEN sign of the Supper Club. The “O” flickering schizophrenically. The front door is wooden with a metal handle worn down to its copper colored center from years of pulling and perhaps some pushing from those that haven’t quite yet nailed down the obvious push pull nature of doors. Inside the howling wind yields to a warm hum. The murmured conversation of patrons only interrupted by the clashing of dishes in the kitchen perpendicular to the dining room which is beyond the large oval shaped bar that is comedically close to the front door. 5 o’clock mass at the Catholic church up the street has not let out yet, leaving a full restaurant of Protestants. Tomorrow Communion will feature bread and grape juice, but tonight it tastes a lot like rail brandy, red meat, and a salad bar. Farmer John is here. His green flannel tucked into his dirty jeans up to the 5th button from the top. The barstool creeks under his weight and his breath smells like canned mushrooms from the empty brandy sour glass in front of him. A couple boys from Kowalski Builders are here. Still in their high-vis yellow hoodies and steel toe boots whose clunks on the floor loudly announce their journey to the urinal or the gambling machines. Bob and Margaret Fisher are here, having a drink at the bar while they await an open table. Marge is tipsy off her brandy sweet on an empty stomach flirting with the Kowalski Builders boys; they humor her with some ill-intentioned compliments. Bob is too deep into a conversation with Joe Verhagen about the deer on his property to pay any attention to Marge. She’ll fall asleep in the car on the way home and apologize in the morning. Joe’s wife Janet sips a martini in judgemental silence, repulsed by Margaret’s behavior and too civilized for conversations surrounding whitetail deer. The empty stool to Janet’s right is a loud expression of everyone else’s opinion of her. Better to be an expressive drunk than sit in silent hypocrisy. The hostess is Ellie Mueller, and this is her last shift before she returns for her 4th semester at Wisconsin-Madison. Her wavy ombre-hair, freckled cheeks, and brown eyes garner much more unwanted attention from the clientele than wanted. But it is attention nonetheless, something she gets much less of at the big state school where she is but a small white speck in the large spangled quilt of the student body. 

Ellie takes my request for a table. I order the queen cut prime rib with a baked potato.  I find that the king cut results in an uncomfortable fullness, or chewy leftovers that take up space in a small fridge. I have a tall brandy old-fashioned sweet with two cherries at the bar while I wait. My cheeks become flushed after the first gulps and the tranquil warmth in the atmosphere swirls within my being. There is a delicate math to the amount of old-fashioneds you can have comfortably during a supper club Saturday night. In a room full of Protestants a Trinity of drinks seems to be the perfect equation. 1 at the bar before being seated sets a wonderful tone. 1 during the meal to wash down the fatty meat with some flavor. And 1 after the meal to bring everything back to a perfect equilibrium. The bitter cold will dull the blood alcohol content to just below .05. 4 drinks leads to oversharing. 5 brings your voice above that perfect murmur of the establishment, and 6 drinks leads to a prolonged flirtatious conversation with Margaret; or worse, Ellie, in which flirtatiousness gives way quickly to creepiness. 

The prime rib is cooked sufficiently. The fat encompassing the meat is more of a goo than a crust but the internal temperature of my pallet allows it to melt down just the same. I pour the cup of jus over the meat as I dissect it. I’m no dainty dipper. 2 packets of butter for the baked potato and a side salad to bring a semblance of diversity to the plate. I finish up and look at my watch. 7 o’clock. I feel the chill of the front door opening. The Catholics are here. Communion wine on their lips.  The murmur in the air becomes a buzz. They are the more outgoing denomination after all. I see my good friend and his brothers at the bar and decide to see if the math checks out on that holy equation of drinks to have comfortably. This is Wisconsin after all, and as a Protestant I put my holiness at stake on Sunday mornings; not Saturday night.

Last Pew in a Reformed Church

The last pew in a Reformed church sits a family. It began with two seated, then three, then four, then five. It was five for a long time. Decades. Then it became 6, then it became 7. Then number 3 and number 7 brought forth an 8th. Sometimes the 8th brings upon the attention of the whole section. Sometimes 7 needs to stand up with 8 in the back. Sometimes 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 are busy and it’s just 1 and 2. But 3,4,5,6,7,8 are never too far away. They still return once, twice, three times a month. Sometimes zero. Eventually there will be 9, 10, 11, 12; perhaps more. Perhaps the family in the last pew in a church will require 2 pews. Decades will pass as a 2 pew family. But then 1 and 2 will grow old. 4 and 6 and 10 and 11 will remain with 5 and 12. 3, 7, 8, and 9 will move away. Back to 1 pew. 1 and 2 watch online. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 will be required to sit in the first pew twice. First for 1, then for 2 sometime later. Pieces of 1 and 2 sit on the mantles of 3, 4, and 5. Some of 1 is scattered in the woods of Florence County, Wisconsin and the mountains of Bozeman, Montana. Some of 2 is scattered behind the school which is behind the church, and behind site 25 of Hartman Creek State Park, Wisconsin. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 return to the last pew. Sometimes all together, sometimes separately. Sometimes frequently, sometimes not at all. But they do return. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 will return to 1 and 2. They will sit together in a pew, perhaps the first, perhaps the last. Definitely forever.

UPS ROUTE 04C: ON A SNOWY EVENING

The warm air of the 2007 Ford Explorer shortbed truck that I drive blows aggressively on the cracked windshield. The snow and ice slowly melts away revealing more clearly the empty industrial parking lot in which I await the arrival of the UPS driver who I will be assisting on his route. It is December 1st. Less than a month until Christmas, and I have taken on a second job to perhaps afford 1 or 2 presents for my Love and my Son. Perhaps to one day own the truck I drive or maybe fix the windshield. As a package delivery helper in the holiday season I feel like some contorted version of Santa Clause. Or rather I am the little elf and the driver is jolly St. Nick. I do not feel particularly jolly but I do feel small. If the American consumer complex is Zeus then I am Hermes. The messenger. Freely flowing between the divine world of the truck, its packages filled with trinkets; and the physical world. A rich man’s heated porch, a farmer’s long winded driveway, the lobby of a senior living center. Delivering temporary vessels of material happiness to households much more valuable than mine. 

The passenger seat of a UPS truck folds down like a dingy chair in the nosebleed section of a baseball stadium. The absence of a cushion yields a surrender of my arse to every bump, rattle, and shake of the rural roads of Washington County, Wisconsin. I exit the truck with a waddle of a boxer after a strong right hand combination to my sphincter. I leave some packages on the front step, some at the mailbox of an unplowed driveway, some perched against a garage door. In my jaded state I can’t help but notice each of the small luxuries present at each property that are not present at my own. I fixate particularly on the outdoor lighting. Some houses have electric candles, some have elegant wine glass shaped motion lighting, some have gothic street lamps lining the walkway. Some people greet me at their door with a smile, some with a judgemental glance, some accost me at the tardiness of their order to which I have no answer other than a sheepish shrug. If only they knew my own circumstances and I would not be the object of their angst I think. My driver is impervious to it all. He drives, stops, parks, hands me a package and prepares the next stops. The extent of our conversation is only remarks regarding the houses, the people, the number of stops left. 

280 stops, 5 miles of steps, and 6 hours later we return to the industrial lot. I let the defrost run for a while. The glare of the fluorescent parking lot lighting reflects on that same horizontal crack in the windshield. I return home up the gravel drive. The truck triggers the obnoxious hospital style motion light of our home. As I step out I can hear my six-month-old babbling in his high chair, and my Love gleefully playing peek-a-boo which retrieves laughter from the both of them. Suddenly, the motion light takes on a much warmer, incandescent glow. The cold wind on my face feels more like a light kiss than a sharp cut. The chorus of joy inside melts away the cacophony of dissatisfaction echoing inside my being, like the snow melting off the windshield. UPS Route 04C, a long route of covetousness was in fact a simple meandering bend in the road to contentedness.