I was feeding a heap of old credit card bills into my paper shredder, doing my best to make sure I wasn’t chewing up something important.
I caught a glimpse of the words “Steak and Ale” and made a quick grab. Too slow. The sheet was pulling my fingers too close to the grinding gears, so I let it go.
Steak and Ale had been a family favorite before it closed 15 years ago. I would have liked to savor that memory once more, but all I got was a glance.
Like a lot of folks my age, I don’t have a lot of childhood memories of dine-in restaurants. Ours was a family of six and we didn’t have the extra money to spend beyond the necessities.
We would get pork chops about once a year at the J & A Grill, a small family diner on Portage Avenue. If we sold extra strawberries and raspberries from our garden, we used that money to go to a baseball game in Chicago. We kept enough aside to buy hamburgers in Hammond or East Chicago on the way home.
As we got old enough to celebrate graduations and weddings, I found out about the Boar’s Head, at Cleveland and Dixie Way. A prom date led me to the Diamond Harbor Inn in Cassopolis.
A few years later, I made a major leap into adulthood. I applied for my first credit card – an American Express – absolutely because I intended to start taking unmarried women to dinner at Doc Pierce’s in Mishawaka.
When Judy and I got married, Steak and Ale, on Dixie Way near Darden, was beyond our price range, but we made it enough of a priority to put one dinner there into our annual budget.
Judy’s memory mainly is of the Kensington Club steak and a luxurious seven-layer cake. My recollection is of an amazing salad bar. I believe I actually tasted caviar for the first time there.
I had grown up with excellent but very structured home-cooked dinners. We would have four specific items to put on our plates as we passed pots, pans and bowls from right to left.
At Steak and Ale, I learned I could sample. Try a dab of cold lima beans. Take a half-spoonful of that thing that isn’t really a mashed potato. I tried pickled beets – not a huge pile of them but just enough to nudge aside the creamed corn or green bean casserole.
It was a lesson that took me far beyond vegetable choices.
I’m reading a book by Jeff Tweedy, founder of the band Wilco, who mentions his lifelong aversion to Abba’s song “Dancing Queen.” An older brother had convinced him to hate that song because it wasn’t rock music. Abba was like disco, which was made for Black and gay people.
Never mind that Abba’s members were Swedish – extremely white – and extremely straight. Tweedy now sees that he was bullied through racist and homophobic attitudes into believing there was something wrong with this hugely popular song.
“Melodies as pure and evocative as the one in ‘Dancing Queen’ don’t come along every day,” he writes. “I’m sad for every single moment I missed loving this song … It feels good to stop hating something. Music is a great place to start if you’re interested in forgiveness.”
That was me, a few years ago, with grunge music and, later, with heavy metal. It wasn’t until I printed out some Kurt Cobain lyrics that I understood the simple brilliance of Nirvana. Same thing with James Hetfield with Metallica. Read along when you turn up the volume to “Mr. Sandman.”
I had grown up with a steady diet of Beatles-style pop rock, Dylan-style folk rock, and Crosby/Stills/Nash-style West Coast rock. Music wasn’t my only rut. I also was reading anything I could find from Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but never Bellow or Updike; driving a lot of Chevrolets instead of Fords; and watching a lot of baseball but no soccer or hockey.
My mother, who was raised by her Aunt Alma, often told me of the tight restrictions she had on her personal life. Not only did all her friends have to be Lutherans, she said, but they had to belong to the Missouri Synod. Those American Synod Lutherans were headed toward hell just like everyone else.
Aunt Alma doesn’t run our universe. Yet I don’t know why so many of us cling tightly to decisions that others made for us.
If it’s family loyalty, I suppose there’s an element of good there. Some traditions bind us together. You may be a fourth-generation Chicago Cubs fan, or your family may produce children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren all loyal to Purdue or I.U.
The issue would be whether it’s the comfort of familiarity that drives us or if it is the fear that is brought on by ignorance. It comes down to how we treat people and ideas from the outside. If we’re trying to promote justice and understanding in a complicated world, we need input from more than just the Missouri Synod.
Aunt Alma’s view came from dinners in a tight family circle with dishes passed from right to left. I doubt she ever saw a salad bar.
Steak and Ale is long gone, as is my credit card memory. I’m grateful for the world I discovered then and there with a dab of odd vegetables.
Now, if I don’t like pickled beets, at least I know why.