Meat Cutting

        Wallace Stegner, a Canadian. was a professor of literature at Stanford and lived in his early life in the Palliser Triangle in Saskatchewan. In his growing up in Willowbunch he describes in the Canadian classic, Wolf Willow the cutting of meat in the icehouse from the frozen side of beef as his job as a kid.That took me back to the identical job I often did for our family as a boy, going to the icehouse and sawing off a piece of meat from the frozen side of beef we had there. I had no idea whether it was steak or roast or whatever. It was just a chunk of beef. It seems to me I sawed off about the right amount that we could eat without identity of any features and my mother never objected to my offering. I assume it was because she wasn"t strong enough to saw off a hunk of solid frozen meat and I was. At that time we lived just north of the Palliser Triangle.
          Boyhood discarded by both Stegner and me, I guess we became more refined, whatever that means at least in respect to meat and he became interested in human behavior at Stanford and I moved to becoming a Sawbones and on to carving a different kind of muscle in Victoria.
            When I met my prospective father-in-law in Winnipeg he told me he been a dollar-a-year man serving on the rationing board for the Canadian government during the second world war. He was responsible for the rationing of meats and strict adherence to the meat charts and responsible for both the cutting and distribution. That would have been a lot of responsibility  for his pay of the annual dollar but it was the holy grail to him. I don't think I ever told him about my dodgy icehouse meat activity or Stegner's either. He would have forgiven us because it was after the war and after rationing but he would have known that the aspirant to his daughter's hand and heart would have had such a rudimentary approach to meat.