CURVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (12)

By: Fran Pado
August 4, 2023

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of reconsidered passions, reassessed hates, and reversed feelings everywhere in-between. Series edited by Adam McGovern.

LIVERWURST

There was liverwurst in the house I grew up in. It was in the fridge with the deli slices. But it wasn’t sliced — it was a thick meat cylinder, stuffed into a muddy yellow plastic tube. Think of a giant pill of ground pig and calf organs that’s been stretched lengthwise until it is the size of an arm. At least this is what I had thought about liverwurst and what it looked like. But I googled it recently. And it doesn’t look like that at all. It’s the size of an arm, but not my arm now. My arm then. When I was a child. My room was just upstairs from where it lived with the bologna from the German butcher’s. It was a small, thin arm.

I craved the saltiness. I loved the ritual of eating it: plopping the liverwurst on the table, getting out the paper plate and the table knife, staring at the liverwurst while it warmed in the air. Then digging into its open pink meat cave and scraping out big hunks. Running for the rye bread. The mustard. The crusts always took care of whatever was left.

This was something I ate at my dad’s house. He’s been dead for 22 years. When he first died, I kept seeing him everywhere: Bedford Ave. in Williamsburg, smoking on the G train, just ahead of me in line. My friend John told me that this was quite normal. But then, he said, they show up less and less. They just sort of go away. That’s what happened with liverwurst, too. It went away and to bring it back would be pretty impossible.

***

MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

CURVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (12)

Categories

Tags