When my father, who moved out in the seventies, found he had a heart condition,
we as a family stopped preparing red meat for meals.
We Bergers may live apart, but we also live together.
None of us stopped eating it entirely, but it stopped being a meal to eat at home.
While growing up, though, my Mother would prepare steak in butter, and it was delicious.
I do not believe I have had this savory meat in a decade. Still I treasure it.

Every week or two, Mom and I would order cheap Chinese from the takeout place in the corner, just get forty dollars worth of food for two that would see us through half a week.
A lot of fried stuff there.
The first meal would often go on far too long,
well into sickness.

Sometimes, we would hear a sharp crack! out the window, and I couldn’t tell if it was a car backfiring or a gunshot.
Only in the last year or two have I heard that cars haven’t really backfired since the seventies.