A World Without Bacon

As soon as the words leave my pen I see the creatures massing on the horizon. The sniffling, snorting, grunting, ground-churning, bamboo shoot-eating, blueberry uprooting, dahlia tuber decimating, thick-skinned, long snouted hordes. Can you imagine them thundering across the dark land through our dreams, forever after to be called nightsows. It's too late now. There's no turning back. We've opened that box, the one that reeks of pig shit, and our worst nightsow has been released into the field of play where two armies meet, all because we stopped eating them. Oh I can hear you say, I only meant MY world without bacon, but as my father liked to say, that doesn't work at all...if you do that, everybody'll want to do it. Then what would the world be like. And you started it. And so on. It was a little retort that would pop up of a Saturday, the day my mother worked at the department store in our local shopping center and the two of us men were left to our own devices, the rashers, as he used to call them, sizzling away on the stove top, and the open tin of Heinz pork and beans neatly stripped of its cylindrical label there in all its glory on another electric burner heating up for the waiting toast. It was a great lesson in leading the hobo life in case the world ever went to hell in a handbasket——a very curious image and difficult for my ten year old mind to hold onto, but never mind, we were saving on dishes, a rare opportunity for my father, on his one day in charge of the kitchen and my education.

And that's the thread of the story——the pig has been with us, with my entire family, through thick and thin slices, rumps, roasts, ribs, legs, even the trotters pickled for the delight of a —— I'm stuck for the phrase that contains a pubful of Guinness drinkers——a dark phrase...

It's in our blood, as they say, a veritable marriage of man and beast though I regret saying that. I didn't mean it for a second. We'll keep the work 'relationship' out of this as well. Suffice it to say we had to do it, legions of us, with all the devious and sundry methods to hand, we had to overcome our pigs and eat them too. That takes care of that, doesn't it?

Oh we could talk on about the pigs for pages, how their intelligence and ours have danced a merry dance through the millennia, each of us moving the bar a little higher before breakfast. Of course this is all hogwash and I'd be a poor observer if I didn't note here how disadvantaged the poor pig in the face of it. For one thing, they never had to go to mass, get on their knees and pray for forgiveness. After all, what have they ever done wrong? They're just sniffing for any old morsel with their extraordinary snouts——the poor things——have pity on them. I remember well the rainy afternoon in Kerry, a gray day indeed, the color of pig slurry, and a pig in my uncle's care hung up unseen by me in the outbuilding, screaming his blood-curdling scream. I will never forget it. But what's worse was the week after at Tommy Maher's the butchers, when we went in for our rashers and my uncle saying we're only now gettin' back the creature who sang out on that rainy afternoon, as he took up the package, and I put two and two together and thought hard, for the very first time, of a world without bacon.