I seem to recall my parents discussing, over a period of time, the butchering of one of our bulls: Blackie, the Black Angus! The little
black calf I helped feed from a bottle had grown up. One day he came home wrapped in a hundred little white packages, like the ones in the meat market at the grocery store, only opaque and white, like hospital sheets; and for the first time in my life, the hamburger and steaks and spare ribs we ate for dinner were actual pieces of something I had history with, a being I once knew as a life, an animal I had petted and loved, a baby I had fed, a living creature whose living eyes I had looked into. And even though the family would joke around the dinner table-- "Boy, that Blackie tastes good, but he sure is tough!"—it didn’t seem real to me. I wasn't there when he was shot, slaughtered and packaged. The image of Blackie on the slab is not a memory I have. All I remember is that one day Blackie was there, the next day he was gone, and a week later we had a new freezer, packed with meat. As a growing boy, I voraciously ate him up: chewing a lot, though, as he tasted good, but…