chicken feet

"You want to try?" Lorna asks me, shoving a quart plastic container under my nose. When I peer inside I see five or six objects, all of which are slightly reddish in color and have three "prongs" like pitchforks.

"Adidas," she says, as if this would explain everything.

Tennis shoes, I'm thinking? This makes no sense whatsoever.

"You try," Lorna says again, gesturing with her plastic-container-holding hand.

"What are they?" I ask her, trying to gain myself some time. One of the pleasures of Mom's incapacitation is Lorna's cooking....but it is also one of it's downsides as sometimes I feel required to eat (out of politeness) that which I do not want. Today may be one of those days.

"Chicken feet," she says with a cackle that's almost a giggle.

"They're what?" I say back to her with incredulity.

"You know....the feet of the chicken," she says with her particular Filipino emphasis.

As I look back down into the belly of her proffered dish I see that's indeed what she is offering--the three-pronged objects in sight are each either a left and a right foot from a now-dead-chicken. This thought alone--of chicken with decapitated feet--makes my stomach roil, not to mention the idea of eating one of these 'delicacies'.

'Hmm..." I manage to say, "how interesting," a word, which my students have pointed out, can point to a bevy of different conclusions. In an effort to stall for more time I ask her--"How do you prepare these...these...feet."

Lorna smiles then, happy to talk about her hard-won cooking experience. "Ketchup, soy sauce, pepper, salt...then fry them in a pan."

Things are not looking any better on the chicken feet front.

"You try?" Lorna says again and then adds, "You be a good Filipino." referring to the fact that I have tried and generally liked most everything Lorna has offered me. The question has only been how much oil and grease my body can handle.

By this time Mom has begun to clue-in, realizing what Lorna is talking about--chicken feet. She says to me, in an excited almost demanding pitch--"Let me...let me...seeeeee." So Lorna carries her plastic tub over to Mom's wheelchair to give Mom a bird-eye view of the killings. One of the fascinating developments of Mom's dementia is her loss of politeness. Not that Mom is impolite, but rather she no longer has the capacity for playing poker--her face sometimes reads everything she's thinking. When viewing Lorna's vitals, Mom's face takes on the affect of a pug dog--nose flattened and facial muscles curled into a complex weave of interlocking folds and wrinkles. She's a dead ringer, but for the bark.

"Yuk," Mom says very loudly and clearly, speaking presumably for both of us, though I don't tell Lorna this.

Lorna laughs then--a bullet burst of sound that takes both Mom and me by surprise--I expected she might be peeved by Mom's obvious dislike. "Not a good Filipino," Lorna adds then, patting Mom's hand with affection. "Not like your daughter."

Lorna turns again to me with her plastic dish outstretched in her right hand, an offering that can't be refused--"You try?"

"Sure," I say without too much obvious hesitation, wondering just how much I am going to regret this adventure into the culinary world of the Philippines.

When Lorna tries to proffer me two pronged feet, I beg off saying one foot is enough--"I'm already full," I tell her, rubbing my belly--"ate lunch late," though really I hadn't had lunch at all.

Lorna hands me a fork and I wonder how one begins to eat such a thing, never mind why one would eat it. As I turn my fork on it's side and begin to use it as a knife, I immediately hit hard bone. Ouch...I've hit the deep-bone marrow of this chicken's foot. Hmm, I'm thinking, no wonder Lorna likes these things--Lorna only eats bony beef, as in ribs, bony chicken, as in chicken wings. She likes to gnaw and wrestle with her meat.

Lorna observes my difficulty and waves to me with her fork-less hand--"Pick it up, my dear, pick it up, chew it off the bone." I can see she is already doing the same.

While I may have been wiling to try a chicken foot, I am definitely not willing to gnaw straggly strings of meet from a chicken foot bone. I begin again with my fork. After several attempts I discover that if I push down hard enough on my fork I can separate each chicken toe (or is it a talon?) into a series of three jointed bones, minuscule in size. How one separates the meat from these pieces of severed joints is beyond me, so I pop each joint into my mouth, trying to separate the joint from the flesh through a sorting movement in my mouth: my teeth push meat to the right, bone to the left. The result is effective but nauseating. I now have a mouthful of bone and mouthful of what amounts to loose slimy chicken skin--as it tuns out there really isn't much edible flesh on a chicken foot joint.

"Hmm..." I say to Lorna. "Very interesting."

Lorna smiles at this concession, apparently happy I've tried her delicacy, even if Mom has not. Unlike my students, she's not worried about my choice of adjectives. I'm relieved, as I don't want to disappoint her conclusion that I'm her honorary Filipino.

When I look down at my plate, however, I realize I have two more "toes" to go. I wonder how I will do this. Lorna has already gnawed through her entire chicken foot, three prongs in all, and is moving towards the bathroom to wash up her dish. Here, I see my opportunity at last, as I quickly cover the five feet between my chair and Mom's in-room garbage can. When the top of the can flips open with a clank, hitting as it does every time Mom's dresser drawers, Mom looks up, watching as I scoop the rest of the chicken foot into the debris of Mom's Depends and Lorna's used surgical gloves.

"Nice..." Mom says suddenly, "nice save."

As I bolt back to my seat before Lorna returns, Mom begins to laugh, like an old car engine starting: how initially there's a cough and maybe a backfire as fluid hits the starter but before long the mechanics are chortling boisterously, in rhythm at last. Mom is like this engine, her laughter catching as her engine roars at full throttle. I laugh too. There's no helping us, no stopping our good humor.

Some days are good like this.

Deeply, a mother's daughter
--this is alifewithmom--