Thanksgiving

In my childhood and teen years I thanked God for everything. Everyone did. You thanked Him for all the things you had and for all the things you didn’t have, for the tribulations He spared you and those inflicted on you: the former showed his love, the latter was His way of testing your love.

You might think that this reflection comes as I prepare an edifying invocation for Thanksgiving dinner next week.

It doesn’t. Now I give thanks mainly because I never became addicted to smoking and radio talk shows and that I am not a Republican, not exactly what you close your eyes and say in solemn tones before a joyous feast.

This solemn recollection comes as I am doing what I usually do when my wife prepares dinner at home: the unskilled tasks of washing the vegetables, and later, the pots, pans and dishes. It’s the only contribution I can make or that she wants me to make, given my utter lack of culinary skill.

The fervent thanks comes to mind because I recall how much more complicated those tasks were back when I was a kid. You had to wash and clean all the food ingredients, thoroughly.

You sifted the flour, I never knew why, but I suspected it was to isolate the odd weevil: hey we lived thousands of miles from any wheat field and transportation was slow, so one or two would have crept in while government regulators were busy dealing with World War II.

You “picked” the rice, meaning you spread it out on the table and laboriously picked out every tiny grain of gravel or granulated asphalt or husks that escaped the winnowing wind which blew those particles from the crumbling, partially paved rural road on which that rice had been laid out in the sun to dry.

The first time I tried to help my wife with cooking chicken, she asked me what I was doing, as I was trying with surgical care and precision to remove every trace of membrane that didn’t look like meat from the “Boneless Skinless Chicken Breast”. That was what I thought I had seen my mother and sisters always doing when preparing chicken, whole chickens, raised in our backyard, or any kind of meat, didn’t they? How was I to know that that was already done at a processing plant before that chicken was packaged?

Washing vegetables meant washing each leaf of lettuce, individually, peeling every carrot, scrubbing every cassava, yam, dasheen or potato, scrutinizing every organic (the only kind then) fruit for the odd worm.

It’s a role that I, as a male, inherited from a culture and generation in which males were nourished by the womenfolk: mothers, wives, sisters. Even in the years while abroad at university, it was the kind Irish lady of the household with which I lodged who provided most of my meals. In my early post-university years when I had to fend for myself as a single adult male, I did what single, adult males of most species do for survival. I hung out with similar single adult males and as a pack we foraged for food: from compassionate wives of married friends, girlfriends, fastfood joints, the occasional splurge on a dinner date...those were survival.

So, I never learned to cook.

I have tried to adjust to my new reality of a household in which there’s no division of labor along gender lines. In fact I fancy that I make a reasonable boiled egg and choose just the right number of seconds in microwaving frozen burritos, chicken pot pies and vegetables. But my wife and kids are unanimous in assigning me those unskilled tasks when they are cooking. I wonder why.

Or should I just be thankful?