by Schuyler Bates - December 31, 2007
When I was but a mere lad of 9, my family and I lived in the midwest and were members of a small Lutheran church, a congregation that had decided to have a chili supper on New Years Eve. Whether the supper was to raise money or to share fellowship I don't recall. But I remember with vivid precision bundling up on a bleak midwinter evening and heading over to the church basement with my family to enjoy several bowls of "the perfect soup".
One family in the church had volunteered to make the chili that would feed close to 100 hundred people that night. Not a formidable task, to be sure, but one in which timing is everything. Mom made chili often when I was growing up. Nothing extravagant; just your basic farm chili, with onions, ground beef, beans, a few spices, and tomatoes. I was a tad spoiled growing up with the chili she made because the tomatoes she used were those she'd canned from her garden. Almost everywhere we lived, mom always had a garden. And I defy anyone to find a smell more sublime and satisfying than ground beef frying in onions.
The night was rife with anticipation, possibility. We stumbled out of the station wagon and toward our modest church, excited about sharing food and laughter and Lutheran jokes with our ecumenical brethren and sisteren.
But something just didn't feel right.
Or smell right.
It hit you as soon as you entered the sanctuary on the way towards the stairs to the basement, a smell that ironically has been seethed onto my retinas. And I can only best describe the sensation as having been knocked unconscious and then brought to by someone holding a urinal puck to your nose. In all the momentary confusion from the outset, we could be sure of nothing other than the fact that the odor was coming from the basement.
Midwesterners are inherently stoic. They're also inherently optimistic, but optimistic only in the sense that our mantra has essentially been, "Well, it could be worse." Thanks, mom! And I think it's about to be.
My father was one of the most decent human beings I've ever had the pleasure to know. His sense of fair play and personal responsibility knew no specific theater and made no excuses. Surely, he had to be thinking, this scent of burning tires mixed with rotting cabbage was unrelated to the chili we'd be consuming in about 5 minutes. Please, I could see his face saying.
He was wrong. Dad was rarely wrong about anything, but he was wrong that night. Man was he ever wrong.
As we descended into the meeting room, I think my eyes started to bleed. Several tables and many chairs were set up, and the room was filled with fellow parishioners. It was also filled with forced smiles, uncomfortable pauses and palpable trepidation. It was also filled with a smell that was ruled against by the Geneva Convention after World War I.
There was the usual buzz that these sorts of gatherings naturally have, but it wasn't the good kind of buzz. It was the sort of buzz you'd imagine happening were someone in and amongst the crowd unknowingly getting his hand chopped off later. Then my dad's face said, Okay, let's get this over with.
We got in line, grabbed our bowls and headed down the assembly line toward Armageddon, thinking, "What must something that smells this bad taste like?"
Answer: vomit, and used motor oil.
Now 9-year olds aren't exactly famous for their tact, and I was no exception. The family who'd made the chili were also ladling it out, appropriately, obviously. So as we proceeded down the food chain gang of damnation to get our bounty of chili and crackers and rolls and butter, they blissfully doled out portions of some substance at which a leper would turn up his nose (if he still had one).
I think that wanton obtuseness annoyed my father. That and the fact that the entire basement of that church had become this elaborate Milgram Experiment writ large.
Mom's face told a different story. Something along the lines of, “What does one do to create a flavor that would kill hate? Did they marinate the beans in paint thinner?”
And that's where this 9 year old's lack of tact kicked in.
"This is disgusting," I barely whispered. "I can't eat this. It tastes like the grief of a recent widow." (I was a tad precocious, to say the least.) I protested, slightly louder, looking around me at all the helpless faces of all the families there. The church basement had morphed into an internment camp and some of the folks were planning a prison break. Or at least a bum rush.
"I can't take another bite. My tongue just just fell off."
"Would you hush up!" my mother cried in that yelled aside only audible to me and which only mothers can do. "It's not that bad," she lied.
I looked at my brothers who had been given "the look" by my dad, a look that could stop a bullet train. They were dutifully eating the chili and waiting for their faces to implode, mercifully.
My whole family still can't figure out what happened that night, where was created chili that smelled like a homeless man and tasted like fried milk. The burned-ness of the whole thing was the constant. We surmised that the family who volunteered to make the chili had never made chili before, didn't use a basic recipe but, rather, simply went by what they saw in the Hormel brand with which they'd clearly grown up. That they waited till the last minute. Which means they didn't make batches of it the night before to simply warm it up the next night. (Chili is almost always better the next day because the ingredients have had a chance to get friendly with each other.) Which means they made it in the church basement kitchen. Which means they used a stove that really didn't work that well because it was 5,000 years old. Which means they had to make it in a hurry. Which means they heated everything up really fast and burned the ground beef.
But that wasn't a satisfying theory. Burnt beef doesn't create food mayhem by itself. So we decided that, because they were running out of time, they left the chili boiling on a demon-possessed stove for over an hour, covered. And that it was simply what they thought homemade chili tasted like, having never had it. You've essentially got a large pot filled with god knows what, burning anything resting on the bottom, which then gets stirred up to the top so that more stuff can burn at the bottom in some twisted never-ending cycle of food torture, in every sense.
Yes, that's what homemade chili tastes like. In everlasting hell.
We got through, I hushed up, and my dad choked down 3 bowls. I think his left arm went numb. Then he thanked the family who'd made the chili. Then he thanked God it was over. There are no atheists in foxholes. Turns out there aren't any at church chili suppers either.
Ever since then, mom decided to make her chili for us on New Years Eve. She'd start it in the morning, and by 6 P.M., the whole house smelled like... It smelled like nothing bad was ever going to happen to any of us. It smelled like total and utter comfort, safety and well-being. As bad as that chili was that night at that modest Lutheran Church in the midwest - lo those many years ago - the stories of it my brothers and I recounted the years following that sent mom and dad into unbreathable fits of laughter were... Precious. Precious like faded photographs and kept promises. It's when yet another event gets written down in the family canon that almost seems to get funnier with each telling. It's now the siblings who can't breathe.
I love making my mom laugh, because she's got such a great laugh and it gives me the opportunity to be offensive in the way only the baby of the family could be. But I loved making my dad laugh even more because, well, let's just say that if you made that man laugh, you were funny.
Have a happy New Year. Kiss your kids and call your dad.
Schuyler Bates is a former snowboarder who'd like to make enough $$ to be a stay-at-home-drunk. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama and rarely blogs at The Outer Sanctum.