I read a post today about  vegetarianism – and I guess that would include all meats. All my life I have taken for granted that I will eat hamburgers; uh, that would be beefburgers, not pork burgers, which the “ham” erroneously implies. I take the moment to be perfectly clear about this because when I called this place “The Leaning Cow”, I did not think ahead to the fact that I might start identifying more with cows than with the reason for their leaning . . . the tipping part.

I thought I would aggressively bring up confrontational topics, but I didn’t. This isn’t about that.

This is about me and cows . . .  and hamburgers, meatloaf, sloppy joes. Beef. And what are cows? Well, yes.  This became a problem.

This is Sweet Moo. She was the one who was unable to concentrate on her reading when Sydney was getting his liver checked. She has the cow essence. Some of our other friends are four-legged, furry, cute and black and white spotted.  They are as cow as one can get when stuffed. Some of them aren’t stuffed; they are carved or crafted and just as real – maybe not as cute, but still they have personalities. People bring them to me. And the little guys  look at me. We had this problem with cookouts, for instance, and in defining the policy of  “The Leaning Cow”.

Of course, I could have just ignored it because they are not officially real, but I don’t really accept that – I can stretch my understanding of real. And, sometimes, that stretching gets to an uncomfortable point. This is what I said to the faces suddenly watching my burger eating, and, in some cases, their own munching:

Somewhere there are brain dead cow donors.

Okay, it is not good at all. But, hey, folks, this is not easy to rationalize. So I don’t think about it. Much. And when I do think about it I say, “Well, what about the Green Giant and Little Sprout?” Green Giant Foods 35+ years ago sent out stuffed Green Giant dolls for kids to hug. My mother got one for Robert William and it came in a transparent package. On the outside was written something about her ever-loving Green Giant arriving. She laughed about what the mailman had thought.

So, you’ve got this Green Giant sitting there being  your kid’s friend and you want that kid to eat what? Beans? Green beans?

And that’s how and why my cows and I do our fairy tale, let’s pretend little thing when the grill comes out.