Butter

Could you please pass the butter?

I’m not asking for myself, mind you, I’m asking as a gesture. An entreaty. An emotional bid. The most polite exhortation you will ever receive. I could, since you seem so concerned, reach out and take the butter. Drag that crystal dish across this glass table to my porcelain plate with its lone, dry dinner roll. I could snatch that stick of butter with my bare hands, squeeze it between my fingers, and paint it across my plate the way the kids did when they were in preschool. Do you remember what fun it was to paint with your fingers? To dip each digit into a different color and smear a rainbow across the paper? Across the table? Across the teacher’s blue paisley dress? I do. I remember that feeling, that gleeful abandon, and I could give a demonstration if you’d like. Yes, I could. You need only continue to ignore my request.

Listen, this question only has one answer. You’re sitting right there; the butter is practically melting onto your wrist. I, however, am seated several chairs away with mountains of mashed potatoes and rivers of gravy between us. You might think that I was questioning your competence. “Could you pass the butter” as opposed to “would you pass the butter,” as if to imply that your hand-eye coordination is so inept, your fingers so arthritic, your muscles so atrophied that lifting the butter and its heavy crystalline holder is simply too much. For that, I apologize. I meant no disrespect. I’m not asking for a resume; I’m asking for some butter.

Of course you could pass the butter, but should you? Do I deserve the butter? Might it upset my stomach or clog my arteries? Might it send my LDL cholesterol skyrocketing above the healthy maximum for a man within the critical age range of 45 to 65? Would a critically-aged man such as myself, someone with no family history of heart disease or diabetes, with a rigorous morning exercise regimen that includes pandiculation, meditation, running, hopscotch, vigorous waves to the mailman, ab-blasters, hip-flexors, and a generous intimacy with the rowing machine in the room where our children used to sleep, would such a fit and fickle man be able to withstand such buttery indulgence? Your silence says no.

Look, I know we’ve had our differences. I know that there are quite a few empty chairs in this dining room. I know that I said I would visit the Vons before they ran out of butterball turkeys, and that I would reach out to Gabby and her “friend” to make amends by offering to pay for their cross country flight. But, well, sometimes you don’t visit the store early enough. Sometimes your daughter makes holiday plans with her “friend’s” family without so much as a voicemail left for her own flesh and blood. Sometimes Aunt Clarice and Uncle Marvin cancel at the last minute, deciding, as they have, that family and tradition are less important than pulling a lever in some lurid casino out in Atlantic City. Sometimes a store-bought rotisserie chicken tastes better than a home-cooked turkey. At a certain point, the pageantry of these twice-annual holiday meals just collapse in on themselves. People come to expect it. They come to think that these big bronzed birds just spring forth from the ether, and they chow down without so much as a second glance to the man with the back that was broken to brine, baste, and broil that resplendent bird, to stuff it and dress it and make it gleam, to give it the care it needs- and yes -the butter it demands.

I remember Gabby asking, just as I was slicing a hunk off of one of those beautiful, gleaming birds, she asked me: why turkey? Why not chicken? This was what… ten years ago? Maybe twelve? Long before she became one of those “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Crappiness” types, back when her questions were still questions and not veiled accusations. I told her that a chicken can only feed three people, maybe four, but a turkey can feed everyone. Okay, but why not steak? I knew she was referring to the 72oz Fat Cowboy Challenge at the steakhouse in Camarillo, so I said that steak doesn’t come from a bird and birds are what the pilgrims ate. Did the pilgrims eat canned cranberry sauce? Yes, I said, they did, and then you told her that for every two bites of mashed potatoes she needed to take one bite of salad. Do you remember that? Why not chicken?

Well here it is, in all its glory: the very last rotisserie chicken from the only Vons still standing after the holiday hordes. And here it is: the last dinner roll from that torn plastic bag, stale and dry and in desperate need of something to moisten its crumb, something to lend a bit of sweetness and richness to its crusty, cutting, unloved interior. Do you know of anything that would help? Anything at all? If you see it, whatever it might be, could you pass it along?

I would be forever thankful.