Deciding Which Doors To Go Through And Deciding How To Go Through Them

Did you see where Sarah Palin said in an interview that if God opens the door for her to run for president in 2012 that she'll plow right through it? Good choice of words, Sarah. Plow on through.


As you may be able to tell, I am in a mood today. It started last night when Mr. Moon was very late coming in from hunting and I ate my dinner all by myself. Now usually I wouldn't care so much and I'm not sure why I cared last night. I'm perfectly content to eat my black beans and watch The Office by myself, but I think maybe it had something to do with him taking our son-in-law hunting for the first time. Jason actually shot a deer- his first- and Mr. Moon shot one too, which necessitated the gutting and skinning of the animals and packing them in ice. Again, this doesn't usually bother me and as I have said, I'm happy to have the meat in the freezer. It's good, clean meat, humanely killed.


But there was just something about knowing that Jason had shot his first deer that sort of got to me on a lot of different levels. He's a meat cutter by trade, so he's not exactly unaware of how those pork chops in the package got there, but shooting an animal dead certainly takes the knowledge to a new plane of certainty. It felt as if he'd achieved some sort of milestone and I was proud of him, but it also made me sorrowful.


I'm not a vegetarian but I know that if I had to kill and gut and skin my own meat, I would be, which is hypocritical and stupid. In some ways, I'm ashamed of myself. I think that somewhere inside me, I feel it's wrong to kill animals to eat them, and yet, even though I don't personally go out there and kill them, I enjoy the results of others doing it.


So there was all of that ambivalence on top of the fact that I had started cooking the beans around ten-thirty in the morning and here it was eight-thirty at night and the men were outside, gutting and skinning and I was too hungry to wait for them.


But it was more than that. It was the contrast between what makes a man a man and what makes a woman a woman and it seems to me that traditionally, it's the creating of life that makes a female a woman while it's the taking of life that makes a male a man. I've thought about this for years, especially as applies to war, and it makes me sorrowful for men. I know that killing something or someone isn't actually what it takes to make a man. Far from it, but somehow, for some reason, we tend to think it is.

And let's face it- in our caveman days, we basically had two tasks:

Stay alive and make more people.

Staying alive required hunting for food and staying safe from predators, both the animal and fellow human ones, while making more people required giving birth. And thus we evolved. Men hunted and protected and women gave birth. And also learned to grow things, which is another way of creating life.


Okay. Of course it's all a lot more complicated than that, but do not tell me that this is not still a part of how our brains are wired.


And so I hugged Jason and told him I was proud of him and then I said, "You've really got something to think about now."

He tried to shrug it off in a oh, it was nothing sort of way, but he knew what I was talking about. When he left, I gave him a piece of buttered bread just out of the oven to eat on his way home and somehow, that seemed very symbolic too. Like maybe, here- you've done the man thing and brought home game, now partake of the woman thing, which is the ability to take grains and yeast and salt and create bread.


I loved him even more for going out there in the cold woods and bringing home meat but it made me sad, too, because that requires a death. And it also made me sad, in a way, because Jason's father died when he was very young and so he never got to learn the manly skills from his own father, the way Mr. Moon did. I'm grateful that Jason wants to learn from my husband. It's a sort of grace they share. But still, it's a reminder of the profound loss Jason had when he was so young.


Oh. I over think-things and I let things mean more than they should. I know that.

I wish I didn't. I wish I could just let things be what they are. The cigar is sometimes just a damn cigar. Get over yourself and smoke it.

Etc.

But that's not who I am. I am an over-thinker. I am an over-analyzer.


And I can't help it.



And now, it's my job to help my daughter Lily learn to cook deer meat. I was thinking about that in yoga this morning. She needs a crockpot. She needs her mother.


And this thought sort of settled me. A man doesn't just pick up a rifle and go into the woods and shoot game. He goes with someone who knows what they're doing, who can pass that knowledge on. Jason did that with Mr. Moon who learned from his own daddy.


And Lily will learn to cook the meat from me.


Knowledge is passed on, passed down. That, too, is why the human race is still alive.


I will teach my daughter what I know about cooking the meat that her husband has learned to kill from my husband. This is the way of life, even here in 2008. We're not cavemen and women, but we still need to eat. And there's something very primal and very satisfying about eating meat that was killed in the woods, just as there is something very primal and fitting about eating greens from the garden, even though there's a Publix on every corner.


Primal and satisfying like teaching the younger ones the passed-down knowledge of the older ones.

Doors don't just fly open. Someone usually holds them open for us and we can choose whether or not to go through them and we can also choose whether or not to plow through them or to take our time, waiting patiently for the right moment like a hunter in the woods, waiting to take his shot, like a cook in the kitchen, waiting for the bread to rise.

Mr. Moon held the door open for Jason last night and he stepped through it.

Grace-fully.

I have no ambivalence about that. None at all. And I hope Jason doesn't, either.