making bacon for my ex

I am never going to use my ex-husband's name on my blog cause he's a prick lawyer and although I doubt that he would spend money to sue me, he might threaten to do so and frighten me. So I am going to give him a fake name. I will call him Dick, short for dickhead. How's that?

Dick, like many humans, male and female, loves fried, crisp bacon. Not the kind that is sold precooked, zapped to flatness by machine and then just reheated in some restaurants. He likes the kind that is fried in bacon grease, moved and tended so it comes out flat and perfectly, evenly cooked, end to end, with little bulges of where the fat stayed a little fatty and crispy spots where the meaty part fried up.

As any real cook knows, it is easy to cook this perfect bacon. I acknowledge that there might be more than one definition of perfectly fried bacon. For purposes of this essay, let's go with this one, narrow description: evenly cooked strips of bacon, fried in its own fat, turned over and over, tended while frying so it cooks evently. And then when you drain the slices on paper towels, they ended up straight with little bulges of fatty part that are delicious. The whole slice is perfection.

But Dick's mom had taught him how to cook and she was a lousy cook. She just threw a bunch of bacon in a pan and did other stuff while it fried and carelessly tended it and bacon came out overcooked, undercooked, sometimes burned. Once in awhile, with her approach, you got perfect bacon but too often you got a little burned, a little raw, and a lot of imperfection.

I was taught how to cook bacon and everything else by my dad. Cooking was one of the ways my dad showed his kids he loved them. He loved us through perfect bacon, among many other things.

You cook perfect bacon by putting it in a heavy skillet, starting slow, and as the bacon grease slips off the bacon into the pan and that grease begins to cook the bacon, you tend the bacon, moving it around so it keeps cooking evenly and flatly and perfect. It is very simple and yet not:  you have to pay attention. It is very simple if you pay attention and move the bacon as needed. Lots of things in life work this way: if you tend it, it goes better.

I struggled with this bacon thing. A newly graduated lawyer in the early days of my brief marriage to Dick, I wanted to be feminist in all things. I wanted my new husband to share home duties so I didn't get stuck doing all the house stuff and him just watching ball games while I worked in the evenings and weekends. Guess how that turned out?

Once in a great while, like Mother's Day or my birthday, he would start breakfast and then burn the bacon.

Was he being intentionally manipulative?  Maybe. But I don't think so. I think he was a garden variety entitled male who had grown up in a world where women cooked, men partook and that was how it was supposed to be. I don't think he intentionally fucked up bacon. I think he just didn't get it:  that paying attention matters. Which is almost funny when you consider that he was the general counsel of a gigantic agribusiness that did billions in sales each year. His work life was all about paying attention to detail.  You don't handle the closing documents on the sale of endless ranchland, involving millions and millions of dollars without tending to the details.  But the guy could not focus long enough to fry one decent piece of bacon.

I also liked good bacon so I surrenderd on the bacon thing. I cooked all the bacon.

Most men, if not all, are like Dick. They don't pay attention to the same things that women do. If they did, there would be no war.

I have a male 'friend' (he ended our friendship a few months ago but just this week, he just happened to run into me at a public event, imagine that, and asked me to join him to talk over coffee, which I did and he told me that ending our friendship had been a stroke of genius on his part and that since he broke my heart by ending our friendship, he had finally gotten from me what he had wanted all along? What did he get?  I have hidden my pain from him. I have affirmed my very sincere good wishes for his happiness and success. That's what he wanted? Stilted courtesy hiding my pain? That's what he wanted all along:  a veneer of friendship with no messy feelings?  I wonder if he can fry bacon.  I doubt it. He doesn't pay attention to the details. I bet he plops several slices of bacon in the pan, then he starts the coffee, burns toast, overcooks the eggs and wonder why the bacon is burnt in spots and undercooked in others. Like our "friendship".