Brats and blessings -- i

Sunday night's sort of loosey-goosey around here--grab what you makes you salivate, cook it up or spoon it out or spread it--no rituals, pure free agency to get the job done--all of which, for me at least, often enough means hot dogs. My low-brow tastes don't rate with some, but there's no accounting for taste and mine is hot dogs--not cheapies, but good hot dogs.

So I pulled the package out of the drawer--"Johnsonville." They weren't the original Johnsonville brats, the ones known round the world, nor were they hot dogs exactly. Sausages, okay?--little things really. Grab a bun, nuke it and the brat, and in my book you're on your way to a sumptuous Sunday night.

"John-son-ville, JOHNSONVILLE. John-son-ville, JOHNSONVILLE."

Those already cooked brats conjured that line from a memory vault that seems full of things I didn't deliberately plant there, things that rise like the nubbins out back about to resurrect again if the temps ever warm. I didn't ask for that line to return, I didn't sit and think about it, my dad's voice just leaped out of that vault unbidden but perfectly in tact, as if it were yesterday we were coming past the Johnsonville shop: "John-son-ville, JOHNSONVILLE. John-son-ville, JOHNSONVILLE."  

That odd storage unit kicked out my dad's voice, prompted by nothing more than the label on those already-cooked brats. Dad was reading the neon sign on the shop across the tracks on Indiana Avenue, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. He was driving us back from Sheboygan, the city, to Oostburg, where we lived.

When we'd pass Johnsonville Meats, the birthplace of Johsonville brats, THE Johnsonville brats, the company that today sells the quintessential Sheboygan brats to 45 countries around the world, that neon sign out front ran the three parts of the butcher shop's name consecutively: "John-son-ville, JOHNSONVILLE," which my dad would say, musically, predictably, time and time again. But it wasn't just the sign that arose from my memory, it was Dad making it funny from up there behind the wheel. Sixty years ago, a lifetime ago.

That was the second such revelation from the deep to appear spiritually in my consciousness yesterday. The first was Psalm 32, not the psalm itself, but the hymn, which I don't believe I've sung in church for decades. Well, on the Sabbath  yesterday, we did, startlingly. I grew up on church hymnody comprised mostly of the psalms. Despite the fact that I hadn't sung that old psalm for years, somewhere in the recesses of my brain--and heart--it had never left.

So let the godly seek thee
In times when thou art near;
No whelming floods shall reach them,
Nor cause their hearts to fear.
In thee, O Lord, I hide me,
Thou savest me from ill,
And songs of thy salvation
My heart with rapture thrill.

That's the third verse! I knew every word. I don't know that I could have recited it before the lyrics appeared on the screen, but they weren't in the least unfamiliar. "Whelming floods"--sure. Swept me right back to my boyhood.

An old psalm is a long haul from smoked brats, but the inspiration is somehow grounded in psychic events that occur to all of us I'm sure, when suddenly some totally forgotten memory appears in neon across the face of our perceptions and interrupts the march of time we're all on, takes us back instead to some nondescript moment we're startled to realize we've not seemed to have forgotten--something as banal as a stuttering neon sign on a butcher shop, or something as sacred as hiding in the Lord.

(more tomorrow)