In Loving Memory of My Father
a New Year's tradition rears its smelly head
Dad was a creature of habit, which is a sign that someone may score on the low end of the "openness to experience" spectrum in the Five-Factor Model of personality.
(I promise this gets interesting.)
Being low in openness to experience correlates to a limited appreciation of art and fantasy. They also say that openness to experience tends to be blueprinted onto one's offspring more so than other factors in the model. In other words, if you look at an abstract painting and say things like, "It looks nothing like a dog!", there's a good chance your children will have the propensity to say similar things when confronted with similar data.
(I'm not criticizing people for who they are. And one's level of openness to experience has nothing to do with their intelligence or their worth as people. One can fully appreciate the anguish of The Weeping Woman and still be a jerk, you see, or dumb as a handball.)
I probably score higher on openness to experience than my father would have, and logic tells me it's because my mother probably does as well. But I still retain more than a whiff of the old man's genes. A lot of modern art bores the bile out of me. (People say it's because I just don't get it, and I believe them.)
But back to creatures of habit, because this is also where my father's blood shows up in my veins.
I’m not this way when it comes to food. I’m open to any culinary experience and will try anything you put in front of me—with the possible exception of bugs—and I love variety and surprise. I also love a lot of art. And I love fantasy, real-world and printed. And I love music, although my critical ear in this realm has been so mangled out of proportion by music educational snobbery that I might as well be completely tone deaf. Evaluating a new piece of music requires a conscious effort to put aside all prejudices drilled into my head by the Masters of the Arts and actually listen to the thing before judging it on its own merits.
But you see, my father disliked most new music and was extremely vocal about it...
Ah, but we have no time for this! I have my routines and fetishes and I'll keep them till I'm scattered to the winds. The spirits of both my parents war for dominance of my soul and I wouldn't have it any other way.
So forget all that. I came here to talk about traditions.
You may be familiar with the concept of Chesterton's Fence. (Note: I'm always suspect of anyone who quotes G.K. Chesterton. I'm not sure why. Maybe because in my experience his dopey philosophies and aphorisms always seem to be embraced by pinheads? Don't come at me here. This is my limited experience talking.)
Anyway, here's a semi-interesting non-article from Big Think (is there any other kind?) about Chesterton's Fence. To save you the pain of having to read a Big Think piece, Chesterton's Fence is a philosophical construct that goes something like this: Before one decides to do away with tradition, one must first examine the usefulness of the thing to the fullest, for its continued usefulness may not be discernible at the outset.
I guess the idea does have some merit. Although it almost seems like a self-evident truth—yet another example of Chesterton holding no value for me whatsoever. (I never read the Father Brown mysteries because the TV show starred Tom Bosley. I don’t want the image of Tom Bosley invading my brain when I’m alone with a book.)
At any rate, I do not know why my father found it so necessary to have smoked cheddar cheese on New Year's Eve. But there it was, sitting on the polished walnut cutting board—a brick of luxuriously cream-colored negativity.
The block had grill marks on the rind, which today makes me think of Mitch Hedberg's bit on the now-defunct Texas Grill Fritos. It sat there like a smelly paperweight, generously giving off a perfume of fake hickory smoke, which was both amazing and portended terrible things, because anyone today would instantly identify that aroma as the unmistakeable stink of future cancer.
But these were simpler times, you see. Back when a block of what we called "smoky cheese" was the thing that told us it wasn't just some ordinary evening. It was New Year's Eve!
I've checked. Nowhere is it a tradition anywhere in the world to have smoked cheddar on New Year's Eve.
(Sidebar: I'm calling it "cheddar" as a courtesy. This most likely wasn't cheddar. Remember, this was the 1970s, when people did stupid things like vote for Nixon and buy Jimmy Buffett records. No one had any taste for anything. All the food sucked too. I'm thinking this was some kind of supermarket brand amalgam of 70s dairy products, melted and mixed with cancer, then cooled and pressed into ingots of rudimentarily identifiable "blended cheese product" to be sold by the half-pound to undiscerning folks like my poor father—after applying the grill stamp, of course.)
So, where did my dad get the idea that this was the thing to have? That he had to have it at the risk of the New Year never arriving, or worse, arriving along with harbingers of the Apocalypse? Because it was always there, every damn year, sitting on the polished walnut cutting board (only for special occasions, this) and giving off its phony-ass bacon breath.
I'm being mean here. It really did smell great. But it tasted like a mouthful of bad news. Tart, undersalted, and coated with smoke. (I've had cigars with more subtlety.) And one bite was enough. You'd see it there on the polished walnut cutting board, say, "Alright! It's not New Year's without smoky cheese!", and have a bite. Then you regretted your birth. Not even a half a sleeve of Ritzs could mop the taste out. You just needed time. And they must have put something weird in that smoke flavoring, something that altered our brain chemistry, because we always forgot how terrible it was by the time next New Year's rolled around. We'd see it there on the polished walnut cutting board, say, "Alright! It's not New Year's without smoky cheese!", and the doom cycle would continue.
So what would Chesterton say? Probably some dipshittery having to do with Christian morality. (Sorry, it's only the people I've met personally, you understand...) But his silly Fence dictates that we ought to examine the usefulness of smoky cheese. Mortality salience necessitates that we find meaning where we can. Why not in smoked cheddar?
Nope. It was terrible. I don't know why my dad loved it so much that he considered it a rare and radiant gem of a treat on New Year's.
The tradition ended when my parents split. Mom is a Catholic more into Lewis than Chesterton, but she knows good cheese when she sees it. The smoky cheese tradition hasn't returned. Not here or anywhere. Nor shall it. Good riddance to it.
And Happy New Year!