Karen Babine Bones At Hackenmueller’s Meats in Robbinsdale, the smell of smoking
meat seeps through the brick into the street. The door to the butcher shop is old wood, the kind that makes you believe in your bones that the small shop has been in business for more than a hundred years. There’s something here that rings of the 1960s, like the old photograph we have of my grandfather with his feet propped on his desk, horn-rimmed glasses on his nose. I imagine that man might have frequented a place like this, perhaps with my grandmother in a calf-length skirt holding my toddler mother by the hand. It is a satisfying image. The staff in their white aprons is energetic and knowledgeable enough that when I say “I want bones for stock,” they tell me I have choices. As a vegetarian in a butcher shop I trust their expertise, because until today, I didn’t know the difference between stock and broth, and I walk out with $17 worth of soup bones and marrow bones. Bones are not cheap. Maybe they shouldn’t be. After we learned that embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma is a soft tissue cancer, one whose cells appear like the skeletal muscles of developing embryos, which is ironic considering the tumor developed inside her uterus, after the hysterectomy, after her first chemo treatment, after the failure of her anti-nausea medications under the doctor’s terse orders don’t let her throw up, after several days passed before she could be convinced to eat anything, we wondered: feed a fever, starve a cold, but what do we do for cancer? There is a desperation involved in feeding someone undergoing such treatments, not only because of the horror of it, not only because those chemicals change taste perceptions, but the failure to care for the most basic needs of someone you love so deeply is unacceptable. My mother’s palliative doctor tells her that dysguesia is the technical term for food tastes like shit, but this information does not help much, so he prescribes Ritalin to stimulate her appetite. We laugh, knowing how many of her fourth-grade students were also on Ritalin. We learn that our friend M. survived chemo on mashed potatoes and ice cream; F. couldn’t tolerate sugar. My mother has trouble swallowing, complicated by a feeling she calls dead belly, like her entire midsection has filled with concrete, exacerbated by incessant belching, so my days are spent in her kitchen with the press of chicken under my fingers, the heft of beef bones, the slice and chop of carrots, onion, and celery, in pursuit of bone broth and a miracle.
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