Who Stole My Meat?

I’m halfway through writing a post about comic books, and it’s an important topic, to be sure, and I promise I’ll get to it soon, but right now, I have something more urgent to share:

One time, someone stole all our meat.

I’d forgotten about it – let bygones be bygones, you know? That was, until the memory surfaced yesterday, when my husband questioned why I was reluctant to get an extra freezer.

“They’re nothing but trouble,” I said. “Slippery slope.” Let me tell you why.

At my step-dad’s house, we had a chest freezer in the basement garage, your basic white cubic model stocked with surplus meats and random leftovers. As a teenager, I’d have paid no mind to the thing, except that it contained the maple sugar candies.

My step-grandmother, a mythical and powerful being from Seattle, had mailed the candies to our family for Christmas. They were little brown leaves made entirely of crystalized maple syrup, pure crunchy goodness. Being too precious for consumption, the quasi-Canadian delicacies were stashed in the garage freezer, with an order to never, under any circumstances, eat them. As far as I know, they’re there still.

That is, except the half dozen that I ate, frozen sugar bites stolen in moments alone in the basement, mouthing mapley sweetness in the dark, hoping no one noticed. They tasted all the better for being forbidden.

In my teen years, I had a wolfish sweet tooth. On the way to school, I stopped for bags of candy at a convenience store, and throughout the day, I’d either be tilting tubes of Pixy Stix into my mouth, puckering my lips around sour Warheads, or if the season was right, incising candy corns into their orange, yellow, and white bites. Sugar sugar sugar, I couldn’t get enough.

It was during those secret visits to the chest freezer that I took stock of our meat reserves. My mother, bless her dear heart, and she’s reading this, so Hey, Mom, had some “accumulating tendencies.” The freezer was full. It was ready for the End Times, just as long as the End Times didn’t cause a power outage. We were rich in frozen goods.

But that sense of security was shattered one morning when we discovered that our freezer had been hijacked.

Someone broke into the garage and stole all of the frozen meat. Hundreds of dollars in beef, pork, chicken, even a whole turkey, whisked away in the dead of night as we slept.

And to add insult to injury, they also took our bicycles, presumably to transport the stolen goods.

Now, it wouldn’t have been hard to break into the garage. We’re not talking Ocean’s Eleven here (and since the haul was frozen meat and rusty beach bikes, that goes without saying). All they had to do was lift the rickety basement door by hand. There was no lock, no key-code, no security. It was easy for aspiring meat-thieves to load up our riches.

I imagine they filled bags with our icy vittles, then biked away with backpacks bulging, balancing a brisket from one handlebar, a ham from the other. That part took skill.

My parents filed a police report.

“Yes, officer, they stole all our meat. Anything else you ask? Yes, four beach bikes. But not the maple syrup candy, thank God. However, several pieces appear to be missing.”

The bikes were found the next day, thrown off a pier, but the meat was never recovered.

Yet I can’t help but feel those thieves, whoever they were, must have needed it more than we did. I hope they were good cooks and enjoyed their bounty. Or, like Robin Hood, distributed the feast among the needy. That’s the scenario I like best.

And this was the story I related to my husband when he asked why I didn’t want a freezer in our garage. It’s just one more thing to cause trouble. Less is more, I say.

Or, in the words of Thoreau, in honor of National Poetry Month, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”

Except maple syrup candy. In that case, more is more.

– by Jessi Waugh