Communion

I could write about the food. I could write a great deal about the food. But the food is not what’s important.

I’ve had some amazing meals, don’t get me wrong. And cooking is art, there’s no doubt about that. It’s an act of caring and grace to coax raw ingredients into majesty, and when it’s done well, it borders on magic. But it’s not what’s important.

I would know, I’ve had it both ways. I once ate a 90 day aged Chateaubriand in an estate at one point owned by the King of Morocco. It was seared with a crust of peppercorns and walnuts and kissed with a brandy-based pan sauce, accompanied by a beet and goat cheese salad with slices of white truffle. After, we sipped fine port from crystal snifters and ate delicate chocolate desserts with aerated pistachio creme. A paragon of a meal, indeed. But then we went home. “Mommy and daddy had a great time,” we tell the kids. What do you say to a 3 year old? The meal was majestic, but I was not transformed.

My wife and I once dined on fresh langoustines and salmon sashimi in a 16th century building in old Torshavn after a long day hiking up the gorge of Saksun. The fish and lobsters were pulled from the water in the old docks not 100 yards from where we sat. It was spectacular, and I was happy. But I was happy before, in a happy place, with happy company. The food didn’t need to do that much heavy lifting.

One day in 2009 I sat alone in section 212 of the Friendly Confines. One of those midwest storms had rolled through, fierce and transient. The air glistened with moisture and a fog lay heavy over the lake while rays of sunshine dappled the park. The seats were dry, covered from above, but the air was humid, and damp. No one could tell if I cried, and no one cared. I drank a $9 old style and poked at a $8 Chicago style dog. White onion, neon green relish, celery salt, mustard (ketchup is heresy). The Cubs won in extra innings.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

I flew into Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International airport in the late afternoon. The flight was delayed and I’d been drinking since morning in expensive airport restaurants, because I wanted to, and airports are the place to do that kind of thing. Time doesn’t matter there, and no one cares. When I got my bags, the sun was already setting behind the Sloss furnace. My mom picked me up. She muttered pleasantries about the weather on the car ride back to my parents’ house. I said nothing, and watched the darkness fall on the magnolia trees and hills of kudzu, heart and head bowed beneath a heavy weight.

I slept long into the morning in the basement bedroom. No one came for me. I heard the doorway to the basement open multiple times, hesitant creaks on the stairs, then the sound of the door closing. “Leave him be, he needs to sleep,” I imagine them saying. Fine by me. It was dark and quiet down there, better for no one to see what had become of me. I had nothing to tell them anyway.

Eventually I came upstairs. The kitchen smelled of pecans and the morning’s bacon grease. Fiestaware littered the sink in bold reds, yellows, and teals. The smell made me realize how hungry I was.

“Lunch?” my dad was grabbing his coat from the hook in the hall. “I’m buying.” I nod, grateful. I wouldn’t have asked.

There’s a restaurant near 5 Points South where the ribs cook long and low over wood pellets and you can sit outside under a tent on splotchy grass amidst the blooming rhododendrons.

It stormed in the morning. The chairs are damp and the air is humid. The sky is a pale gray above the aging oaks and the fountain. I pick at splinters in the wooden table and no one speaks. I don’t have anything I want to say to anybody, and no one thinks it’s right to ask because, “cowboys don’t talk about their problems.”

We’re not cowboys. We lived out west, sure. We’ve ridden horses. But that doesn’t make us cowboys. But the myth persists.

Luckily, we don’t need to talk. While we wait for our ribs, there’s bread and barbecue sauce. The bread is Wonder Bread, white and chemical. It’s soft for dipping. Our fingers mold it like clay. There are bowls of barbecue sauce and paper plates. A deep south version of chips and salsa. We sop up the sauce, savoring the sweet bite of vinegar and Worcestershire. I take another. Sauce dribbles down my chin. I watch my dad eat white bread and stare at birds in the sky as the cloud cover breaks.

Suddenly the world is alive, hot and glowing. The sauce is sweet and the air vibrates with the hum of happy voices and birdsong. My dad smiles at me out of the corner of his eye and lifts his Wonder Bread in a mock toast. Still heavy in the head and heart, I’m burdened by pains I don’t want to talk about. He has his own, I’m sure. He doesn’t try to solve my problems. He doesn’t even ask. I volunteer nothing. The food is not transformative, it’s barely a meal at all. Just bread and sauce, but we’re together. And for the first time in ages, that’s enough. It may be the most important meal I’ve ever had.

The food is not what’s important.

The world was once transformed over bread and wine, after all. Why can’t barbecue sauce do the same?

There’s magic in the moment, in being present with those who ask nothing and love you as you are, even when you don’t deserve it. Then it doesn’t matter what you’re eating, it just matters to be sharing a meal. Because that’s when the grace peeks through. It’s not the aged Chateaubriand that redeems, it’s the communion.

We played cards that night, the three of us, and laughed at jokes, and told some old stories. Maybe I had changed, or the world had changed around me. It’s often hard to pin down the moments when wounds start to heal. But there is love and grace in a shared meal, if you’re open to it. You just need to know where to look.