The Recipe

The recipe I would like to share has a story to tell which needs to be shared before the questions posed can be answered. Once told, however, I believe there to be a close relationship between the recipe and the subject matter of this course.

My wife comes from a North Central Montana farm family of German descent. Part of the history of many families was the passing down through the generations a recipe for sausage making which was source of pride not to mention some good natured competition. After all if you are participating in a sausage contest there are no losers, only happy people with full stomachs. My father in law, as my good fortune would have it, held a recipe that was one of the best around. Many people tried to make sausage that was tasty as Roger’s but while they might come up with a version that was tasty, the result was, well, not just quite right.

The problem with the recipe was that there was no recipe. Even when I was around to participate in the sausage making, I could not really tell how he was spicing nor could he really tell me. We started with 100 pounds of pork and 100 pounds of venison mixed together with paddle in a large tub. Handfuls of spice were tossed in and mixed in until the meat was well mixed, the meat looked right and had just the right smell. It is not that he would not have been happy to share his knowledge about how much of which spice to add but he never wrote down the recipe.

Some years after my father passed away before we could get the recipe nailed down, my in-laws encouraged me to take up the art to see if I could come up with my own recipe that would be a close representation of what become known as “Roger’s Farm Sausage.” I took up the challenge.

Working from memory, I gathered the spices I remembered he used. I asked other members of the family about what they could remember about how he went about spicing the sausage. Everyone I talked to had a slightly different version of how the process unfolded. Eventually I had enough information to get started so I started grinding, mixing, spicing, stuffing and smoking what hoped would pass for Roger’s Farm Sausage. Curiously, just about everyone who tried it, had a different suggestion what was needed to get sausage closer to the ideal sausage cherished in memory.

Overtime I finally came to understand the reality of certain facts. First, he never made the sausage exactly the same way from year to year. If one spice was too expensive or hard to find, another spice was substituted. He varied the kind of wood he used in the smoker and some years he used liquid smoke and didn’t use wood smoke at all. Second, people remembered different things about how the sausage tasted but they all remembered how they felt eating the sausage. Sunday brunch after Mass always involved a big serving of sausage that had been simmered slowly in a can of beer. The sausage meant the family was together. Finally, the recipe which was finally hammered out over time which was favored by all ended up very different from the first version I tried. The reality is that we all like food spicier now that in years past. The addition of red pepper was an addition of my own which accepted with gusto.

Now to the questions – what constitutes a good recipe? From my perspective the best recipe has a history that intertwines it through the generations and branches of family. The details are not as important as the connection made by just by sharing the meal. Getting the recipe right is part of the charm and enjoyment.

What are the elements we come to expect when reading a recipe? Proportions, measurements, steps, times and temperatures but most important step is the love that goes into the effort. Don’t all the best recipes create the foods we use as an excuse to gather together?

How are the elements arranged? There has to first be a gathering, then an arranging which is followed by the making but there always as to be indication at the end telling when it is time to eat.

Photographs are very helpful in helping you see what are creating should look like at different stages as well was what the finished product should look like. What it comes to sausage, words along will suffice. When the sausage has darkened from pink to a solid brown and is stiff to the touch, it is done. No picture is necessary.

Now for the connection I promised at the start. My story about the recipe reminds me of how Gospels came together. First there was an oral tradition that was handed out across the community and then down through the generations through a period of time measured in centuries. Finally, the Gospel was written down and argued into an acceptable version which was incorporated into the bible.

Dimes, Dogs and Cousins

5 Dimes

This is a short story, but it has many pieces that must come together quickly for any of it to make sense. It was not easy to write or read because affairs of the heart can be bittersweet to embrace. We were at the short end of a long goodbye, and the road before us grew steeper with every step.

This is a story about dimes, cousins, a father, a telephone man with a kind heart, his wife, an old yellow dog, and God's infinite mercy.

Let's start with the dimes. Oakley was my 14-year-old yellow Labrador. That is her in the picture above. When I composed these thoughts, she was in the last days of renal failure and was suffering from what is, for a large dog, extreme old age. We went for a walk, not a long one, at least in terms of distance, but it was just far enough. Along the way, I found a dime in the street along the curb, just a house down the way from our home. It was shiny and bright, so it caught my eye. I picked it up and stuck it in my pocket to throw in the old crystal ashtray I keep on my dresser for spare change. A few steps later I found a second dime, this one had even more shine but did not given evidence of having been run over by traffic. Even though it was way lying in, away from the curb, more out where it was easy to run over. I put the second dime in the pocket with the first one. Turning the corner at the end of the block, I found a third dime, this one in the middle of the street, but it was shiny new and had clearly not been there before the heavy rains that fell during the passing thunderstorm earlier that day. A fourth dime showed up a few steps further up the hill. I put it in my pocket with the others, and we continued slowly up the hill.

A few steps later, I realized in a flash that the dimes were not turning up by coincidence. I was meant to find them—they were there for me to see and, in being seen, to deliver a message. It was not the first time I had a mysterious encounter with dimes appearing seemingly out of nowhere.

Now that the old yellow dog and the dimes have been introduced, it is time to talk about cousins. My father and Pat Power Christianson were first cousins. They were very close growing up, even though her family ranched in Central Washington and our family ranched along the Big Hole River outside Twin Bridges. In the way the passage of years can loosen family ties, our families followed different paths in the years following my father's death when I was 11. We rarely saw Pat and her family. I don't recall having met her children before her daughter Carri, named after my grandmother, contacted my aunt, the widow of my father's brother, and asked to get together with us.

We met and quickly became very close, perhaps sensing in each other what our parents had shared together as cousins so many years ago. By the time we met, Pat had passed away after a long struggle with cancer. Before she died, she and Carri determined that if there was a way for Pat to communicate with Carri, she would leave dimes where Carri would find them. Carri told me she would occasionally find dimes in unexpected places at unexpected times, but the dimes would turn up when Carri needed to find one.

Shortly after we met for the first time, when she brought her triplets to meet the family, Carri and I were coming in through the side door of my house, and one of us spotted a dime stuck in the doormat. Over the next couple of days, we found several more. Laughing at the "coincidences," we agreed that her mother was happy that Carri and I were together and getting to know each other.

I have very little understanding of such phenomena. As a Catholic steeped in Catholic tradition and theology, there is no real explanation for how dimes would mysteriously show up as the dimes did for Carri and me, both when we were apart and when we were together. I believe in matters of faith some things happen for which there is no rational reason. That is, in fact, what faith is all about, belief in a God who can move through time and space to touch a human heart in astonishing ways, including the mysterious presence of dimes.

Since Carri and I met, I have had dimes show up occasionally, but all that really happened was picking up the dime, smiling at the pleasant memories of other times I found dimes, and stuffing the coins in my pocket. That is not what happened the night I walked around the block with the dog.

It is time to expand the story. Roy Halvorson and his wife Helen lived down the alley behind my grandparents, and the Halvorson and Trent families forged a friendship that kept our families bonded through the generations for more than 7 decades. Roy was a great hunter, as were my grandfather, father and uncles, and they often hunted together. Roy had a world-class Labrador retriever named Yippy, and from Yippy came several litters of award-winning puppies. Yippy and her progeny were one of the early lines of blue-blood Labrador Retriever royalty, and from Yippy came the first yellow Labrador to become a field trial grand champion.

In 1959, my father was in his early twenties and still finishing college because he had to drop out when I was born in 1955. He and my mother had virtually nothing while my dad scratched his way through college, and my mother worked as a secretary. Yippy's puppies sold for what would have been a small fortune in the 50s, but Roy found it in his heart to let my father "buy" a puppy from one of the same litters as Buck, the first yellow champion. She was a little thing named Gypsy, and she was the first yellow Labrador female in a long line of successive yellow females in my life from that day until this. For 56 years, my life has been wrapped up and bound together with one dog after the other. With Oakley, the fifth dog, the line came to an end.

Some years later, when Yippy had finally grown old and died, Roy's wife, Helen, comforted my broken heart by telling me in her particular and direct way the price we pay for unconditional love is to have to learn what it means to know loss. Whatever you think you have means minimal unless you mourn the loss of it when it is gone. Those words flooded back every time the chapter for one of my dogs ended. The words are still valid. You really appreciate the value of a good dog when you experience the grief that follows its passing.

Yellow Labradors mean more to me than just being pets. Over the years, 4 other Labradors came into my life and owned my heart. Each of them thought much more of me than I ever deserved. Each of them loved me more than I could ever love them. Each of them brought me comfort, happiness and consolation during inconsolable times. They challenged me to be consistent, giving, disciplined, and considerate. Each made me a better man, but none more so than this fifth and last one, Oakley. She taught me more than all of the rest and, as ancient as she was, is still teaching me even though she passed. I sensed at the time of this experience she would also be the last of the line. So far, that has proven to be true.

My life was changing in ways I could barely comprehend, and the changes happened in ways I would have never expected. Perhaps I had finally grown up, or at least grown. I realized that I no longer lived in my father's shadow, but I was still comfortable with being out in the whole light of life.

The sadness then came not from just the imminent loss of Oakley, which came to pass a few days later, but the passing of a way of life. It was my choice, a decision made in recognition of the changing stages of life I might be called to go where a dog could not accompany me. No one and nothing forced the decision to not get a new puppy on me, and if I changed my mind, nothing would prevent the change. Perhaps some new puppy will come my way, but it is unlikely.

We started with dimes, and now we return to dimes. Why was I finding them? The dimes were an unambiguous message of something, and I believe the message came from Pat. Since my father and I never had the chance to make a pact-like Carri and Pat, I believe he and Pat are together, and my father had Pat send me dimes to let me know everything will be all right. I could let go. He was waiting for this dog to join the other 4 dogs already with him.

So there. The story was told, well, almost told. There was also the matter of the fifth dime I saw lying across the deck from me beneath the BBQ grill as the story flowed from inside out. There is also the mercy of a loving God through whose grace family, friends and 5 good dogs have blessed my life.

Five dimes. Five dogs. I get it. I was a little closer to being able to say goodbye. I am still not quite there yet, but I am okay with that. Acceptance is the consolation of grief, and acceptance comes only through faith that this life is just a chapter and there is more to come. I don't know how sound this theology is, but why I die, I want to go wherever my Labradors went. Can you imagine eternity spent with such love?