She’ll kill the food herself before letting Dad buy it

MOST THINGS CONSIDERED

By:Minx McCloud
   This is it! Next Christmas, Jim and I will go out into the fields of Connecticut with a sledgehammer and slaughter our own Christmas dinner. I’ll go to great lengths to get a decent prime rib of beef, but going to the butcher shop with Dad is no longer one of them.
   See, Dad’s got this thing about getting the "first to third ribs" of the cow when purchasing prime rib. Of course, he wouldn’t know the first rib from the fifth rib, even though he spouts a lot of nonsense about cut and uncut ends.
   I’m sure the butcher gets many requests from folks who prefer a certain type of cut, but my father is, hands down, one of the most abrasive people on the face of the earth, so even the most patient butcher gets a bit ticked off.
   Whereas most people would simply ask for a nice hunk of prime rib, my father immediately takes the offensive, assuming that the butcher intends to put one over on him.
   "I want a nice prime rib of beef," Dad says imperiously, and quickly adds, "and I want the first to third ribs. Don’t try passing off the lousy cuts on me."
   Now if I were a butcher, I wouldn’t like someone referring to any of my cuts as lousy, especially when the shop is filled with Christmas customers. A hush descends over the store and it’s like the gunfight at the OK Corral. The butcher and Dad squint at each other, but the butcher always backs down first. He knows a $60 sale when he sees one.
   He goes into the back room and I picture him saying to his assistant, "Hey Tom, where’s that mad cow we put on ice for the USDA to pick up? I just found a sucker," and then muttering sotto voce, "I’ll give that S.O.B. first to third rib."
   This is a major personality flaw on Dad’s part — the ability to alienate even the kindest tradesmen with insults about their honesty before they have done a single thing to deserve those slurs.
   And when he’s not insulting storekeepers, he is making it clear that he knows everything about everything, and he is only too glad to impart his "wisdom" to you. He can tell you how to gauge the inner temperature of the roast without a meat thermometer and how to figure out if the creosote is building up in your chimney.
   And if he occasionally sticks his hand into the garbage disposal to remove a spoon, it’s something you just have to cringe and bear (while you pray he doesn’t lop off an arm). His favorite phrase: "Oh for God’s sake, stop screaming. The switch is off. I was an electrical technician, remember?"
   Ironically, the merchant who received the worst verbal beatings from Dad is the one who eventually triumphed over him, not that Dad will admit it.
   Dad loves soft-shell crabs, but they’re very expensive. And unlike the Christmas prime rib, he frequents the seafood market all year long.
   After first informing the "fish guy" that his prices are "way outta line," Dad proceeds to order 10 "softies," because he simply cannot resist them. "And don’t give me any leatherbacks," he thunders. "I’m not an idiot." (His local tradesmen beg to differ.)
   Leatherbacks are tough crabs with not-quite-soft-enough shells, and nobody’s ever tried to sell me a defective crab purposely. But Mother said Dad once caught a guy slipping in a leatherback into a baker’s dozen, so he assumes every seafood seller sees him as an easy mark. Dad is not one to develop a friendly rapport with local merchants.
   On one occasion, Dad pulled a boner that is often related at family parties when Dad is in the kitchen getting ice. He was lecturing the fish seller on how to tell a female lobster from a male lobster. The poor guy listened to this claptrap politely and "yessed" my dad the entire time. After all, he may be a blowhard, but he was a regular customer.
   My father, who always picks his own lobsters out of the tank, finally said to the guy, "Knowing how to tell them apart means I always get the female lobster, and she’s filled with lots of green roe."
   I was jolted out of my detachment. Green roe? True, roe is a delicacy, but it’s not green.
   The guy behind the counter established eye contact with me and there was a pleading look in his eyes. Nodding slightly, I gave him nonverbal permission to say the words I knew his heart was longing to say.
   Years of suffering Dad’s pompous ramblings had given the fish guy and me a rapport of sorts, the kind he and Dad had never formed.
   "Sir," the fish guy said, far more gently than my dad deserved, "that green stuff is tamale, the lobster’s liver. They all have that."
   Unabashed, my father has been searching feverishly, for months now, and still, he cannot find a knowledgeable purveyor of seafood.
   Unaccountably, they all seem to agree that the "green roe" is, indeed, the liver.
Minx McCloud is a free-lance journalist who writes about life inNew Jersey. She can be reached at [email protected].
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