Speaking of cannibalism, some families tend to eat each other alive. Three books come to mind when I think about some of my extended family: Little Altars Everywhere and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells, and A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. Theirs are the types of secrets that make siblings scatter and look back at each other with anger and disgust.

But then it’s real food, not sibling-steak, that connects across physical and emotional miles. My grandmother’s funeral service was rushed, and the only personal words spoken were about her wonderful cooking. But then it was a topic that everyone could agree on, this love for good food and the sharing of kitchen knowledge.

After the funeral, one of my aunt’s friends asked about her favorite meals cooked by her mother — stewed chicken and crawfish etouffee were her answers. My aunt is more likely to buy me a good meal than to make it these days, but she knows good food and she knows how to cook it. One of the last meals she made for me was a delicious roast beef po-boy, its roots in her mother’s kitchen, its finesse learned from her daughter’s tour at culinary school. Nearing her husband’s retirement, she ponders moving to the condo in the city and selling the house in the suburbs, but she hasn’t figured out where she’ll put all her pots.

As brash as he is, my oldest uncle will light up when he talks about cooking. He visited a year ago, and stood in my mother’s kitchen describing the arduous, three-day process of making a good crawfish bisque. He’s a master of the crawfish boil and is not stingy with the knowledge. His son-in-law conducted his first crawfish boil last year, and it was a huge success.

My youngest uncle said to me last time I visited that he had cooked his father’s final meal, an omelette, something his mother had taught him to cook, just as she had taught my mother, who in turn taught me. I will make omelettes for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, doesn’t matter.

Although she did not teach me directly, I think of my grandmother every time I make spaghetti sauce. My mother used to cut her tomatoes in the can with a butter knife clicking against the tin. She told me her mother would always crush the tomatoes in her fingers to break them up, but she didn’t really like the squishy feeling, so she did it this way instead. I gently remove the bald tomatoes one-by-one from the can and stick my fingers into them. They shred with ease, leaving fleshy edges that feel good in the mouth. And as I feel the cool tomato juice in my fingers, I thank her for this gift of food.

Forget the rest.

I see her as the sailboat that was her namesake, her sails blown by the wind, toward the western horizon, toward the setting sun. For nearly twenty years, she’s been mostly silent, and I have missed her all this time.

For these long years, I have thought that God should have mercy and let her die, that perhaps this slow death was punishment for sins. But today, I believe that the stillness he granted her these last years was a mercy of its own, a mercy that stilled the pain of memory, that stilled the lashing tongue.

My grandmother inspired me to write. She said so many times, “You should write the family history, Ann Marie.” Her stories seemed more a soap opera than things that would happen in real life. But when I finally reached an age where I was ready to write the stories, she was no longer able to tell them. Her history became a fiction, but I’m alright with that. As objective as the historian tries to be, the truth is colored by his opinions and perceptions, and fiction taints fact the moment he takes pen to paper.

So my memory of her remains incomplete and bittersweet. I see her as that sailboat, and as the magnolia tree, chopped down, but living still, all these years. Goodbye, Grandma.

In Ahab’s Wife, a few shipwrecked characters find themselves adrift at sea in a life boat eating  their dead to live, but blocking out the memory of the trauma. Victims of exposure to sun and salty air, their minds become blurred, and after rescue, they never spoke of what they had to do to survive, perhaps forgetting altogether as part of that survival.

I have a certain fascination with the idea of repressed memory. One of my best friends insists that psychologists who go digging around trying to uncover repressed memories are pure sadists. These things are repressed for a reason, and digging them up will cause a whole lot of damage. Better to leave these things alone and let nature do its job.

My mother has the worst memory of anyone I know, and I used wonder if her childhood was so bad that she’s simply repressed most of it. But then I started watching some of my siblings who seem to have inherited her lack of memory, and I realize it must be something genetic that I didn’t inherit. After all, we had the same upbringing, and nothing very traumatic happened to me.

Or did it?

Once upon a time, I thought I might try to be a lawyer. I found myself in the Houston District Attorney’s office pressing charges against a bad boyfriend, and I thought to myself, hey, this might not be a bad job to have. So, I took a pre-law type class that talked about some of the basics, like the concept of “mala in se,” or inherent evil.

We question whether an act is evil in and of itself, or if there are circumstances that would make that act not evil. We talked about killing another person and how it was usually acceptable in self defense or in war. But what about eating people? Is it never okay, or is it okay if you’re a South American rugby team trapped in the Andes with no other food besides your dead team mate?

I’ll admit it, I wouldn’t kill a man unless he threatened my life, but I might eat him if he lay freshly dead and there were no other bread. And as I did, I would thank him for his gift.

Does that make me evil?

With all these stories of cannibals in the Caribbean during colonial times, some of it must be true, right? There are disputes about whether it actually happened, or if the colonists were just afraid of the natives to such an extent that they attributed their worst fears to them.

Well, if it’s Robinson Crusoe telling the story, I’m going with the racism angle. Yes, I admit it. I’m about to judge this historical, fictional character by my own, more modern and slightly more liberal standards.  Yes, I think he deserved to be shipwrecked. After all, he was the guy building his plantation in colonial South America, who decided to go pick up some cheap labor across the ocean in Africa to help himself and his neighbors.

Now, just because he’s buying African slaves, does that means he’s a racist, or just an enterprising opportunist? Well, there’s more evidence that he thinks his kind are better than other people. He’s proud to be a Protestant, and he can’t abide the Papists. He certainly wouldn’t go back to England and grab up a bunch of his own kind and force them to work on his plantation. But the Africans, oh, they’re just not the same. He might enslave some Irish, but they’re not nearly as abundant or easy to spot when they try to run.

Now we turn to the canoe-driving inhabitants of his little island. While he’s busy eating grapes and raisins, he’s hiding out from the savages who eat the flesh of other humans. He describes these gruesome scenes of human mutilation and carnage. He sees it all first hand. But what does he really see? How much does his own fear of these people paint the picture before his eyes?

Hannibal Lector prides himself on having exquisite taste in all things, not just food. He loves fine classical music, great art, wines and liqueurs. He buys only the best in cars, knives, perfumes, clothes, cookware. He can afford to be choosy, but he also takes what he wants and manipulates people and situations to his advantage.

He thinks that people taste delicious, but he mostly eats “rude” people because they don’t really deserve to live. I do wonder, though, if non-rude people would taste better than rude people since they don’t have all that negative energy flowing through them. On the other hand, maybe it’s their rudeness that actually makes them more delicious, something about the chemicals flowing through their sweetbreads that makes them extra tasty. Or maybe it’s just the sheer emotional satisfaction of eating people who have such disregard for others.

Hannibal owns a well-loved copy of Alexandre Dumas’s Dictionary Of Cuisine, and he sees fine food in the people he meets. At one point, he met a child whose “neck was only as big around as a pork tenderloin.” Luckily the child wasn’t rude enough to eat.

So as part of my food travel adventures, I found myself reading Hannibal by Thomas Harris. I had seen the movie, so I was all prepared for the whole brain eating episode. I’m not as big on organ meat as Dr. Lector is, but I love chicken hearts, and I suspect that, prepared the right way, brain might be just as tasty.

So, I’m thinking back to Gould’s wasp and comparing it to Hannibal Lector. The wasp does what it does to survive, and Hannibal is most decidedly cruel, both physically and psychologically, and it’s not just because he’s doing it to a another human instead of a beetle.

The image from the original Faces of Death movie, where the people are bashing in the skull of the monkey trapped in their table, is permanently seared into my memory. I try not to judge other cultures upon my own standards, but that’s just not right.

In fact, I think it’s even more cruel than Hannibal keeping a man alive so he can feed him his own brain. Hannibal only eats rude people, after all. And what did that monkey ever do to anybody?

I sometimes think much of the morality we have manufactured over the centuries comes from humans attempting to deny that they are also animals. After all, the “original sin” is sex, something that we must do to procreate, as animals. So then the next thing to moralize about is what we eat, which again, we must do to survive.

Some groups moralize about eating cows, others about horses, dogs and cats, others about eating pigs, lobsters and cheeseburgers. Others moralize about eating any kind of meat, denying once again our animal nature as omnivores.

Should we judge the lion for being a carnivore when he was designed that way? We accept the lion the way he is, but then we can choose not to eat meat because it’s “wrong” to eat meat, and then we can feel all superior over lions.

Stephen Jay Gould has a very popular essay called “Nonmoral Nature,” available in the collection Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes, where he talks about this parasitic wasp that would seem cruel by some human standards. So here’s how it works. The mother selects a big juicy insect and injects it with a paralyzing poison. Then she injects her egg into its belly so it can live in the warm body and eat its way out until it’s big enough to survive on its own. The host dies a slow death, and the baby wasp emerges, cracking through the carapace like it’s busting through the shell of an egg.

We can’t call it immoral. It’s just nature. You have to admit, it’s kinda cool too.

The Reader Travels is no longer just a solitary blog site feeding into my Facebook account. I’ve recently started The Reader Travels Vagabond Edition as part of the Vagabond Journey’s new blogger community. For now, it just means that I’m posting parallel blog entries each week, but I haven’t yet decided if I want to make it my new permanent home by transferring archives and merging the two paths.

I suppose that’s what adventures are all about — traveling down different paths, exploring the world beyond my living room.  The irony is that right now, I’m talking about traveling in my own home town over there. And Dallas is far from being a vagabond’s town, although I did give over five bucks in pocket change to a homeless woman who came up to me at a gas pump the other day asking for money to buy something to eat.

I just hate it when panhandlers give me some crazy story about how their car broke down and they need money for a hotel room or cab fare or whatever they say to make the story their own. But it’s almost always about their broken down car. When I lived in Houston, it was usually the guy pushing the kid in the wheelchair, a primal appeal to the heartstrings, and the guys washing windshields, working for their keep. In Dallas, it’s always the broken down car that tells the mark, this is just a one-time situation that will end as soon as I get my car fixed and go back to work.

I gave this woman money just because she said she was hungry. Granted, she was camped out beside a liquor store that hadn’t yet opened for the day, so she still could have been lying, but I don’t really care if my money went to feed her addiction or not. I may have given it to her if she had said she wanted to buy a bottle of rot-gut, just for her bold honesty.

The gas station and liquor store sits on the banks of the Trinity River, and I’ve often thought this river might be a viable place to live if I had no other. I have not walked this river, hidden by concrete, warehouses and industry, but I suspect I might find people there, forgotten by the rest of the world. The City of Dallas is revitalizing parts of the river, but I suspect there will be plenty of refuge to be had, still.

When Arthur Dent found himself in a conversation with a cow at The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, he couldn’t help becoming a vegetarian.  I mean, what would you do if a cow stood there asking you which piece of her you’d like to eat? Perhaps you’d say, “I’ll just take a little milk, if you don’t mind.”

Nobody wants to eat Babe the talking pig either. And most people in Western cultures cringe at the thought of eating horses, dogs and cats, because they’ve gotten to know the personalities of these creatures. I can assume that pigs and cows and chickens also have personalities, but they’re out of sight, out of mind, right? Let’s just eat our meat and avoid eye contact.

But then I think the real problem with the cow offering herself up for Arthur’s dinner plate is that she’s just too darned suicidal and submissive, offering herself up to the blade like that. Okay, sure, it’s the end of the universe, and they’re going to die within the hour, and she might as well put herself on a plate before the inevitable occurs. But still.