There were two or three, fat-and-skin-encased pigs feet in a bowl on the table, the entire morning. I went to do some errands: getting food for En En at the carenderia; buying some ice for our cooler. When I returned home, the same bowl with the same contents was sitting on the same kitchen table. Emelie was sweeping up the bamboo leaves in the yard and asked me if I would start preparations for lunch by cutting up some garlic, onions and the meat. "Meat" was obviously a catch-all phrase, a euphemism for that combination of gristle, fat, hide and bone resting itself on the table.
Emelie knows I don't eat that kind of stuff and I haven't a clue about how to slice it or get it ready for anything other than the garbage, which is what I had in mind, sans garlic and onions. For a moment, I pictured myself hovering over the bowl of pork by-products, knife in hand, wondering what to cut away and what to save: The table stays. Maybe the bowl.
Wouldn't it be be better to lay it in the road and run over it with a truck until it has the consistency of something that would digest in the stomach of the neighbor's dog?
Pig fat probably has some use, maybe in protecting the pig from the severe cold of equatorial winters, or maybe as a lubricant. I watched Bobby Cinco use it for bearing grease on his tricycle recently. The wheel developed a squeal after that, hinting of the pig's bellowing in it's final moments, just before being hacked into ham, chops, and - oh, yes - pig's feet.
No, I wasn't going to prepare lunch and I answered my wife's question with silence. "You should know better than to ask." was the unspoken meaning, underscored by the vacuum of quiet. Later, I was to find out that she was talking about a bag of real pork meat and the feet were for her sister, Jane, who was there at the house with us. Never mind.
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