Pig Massage

We were having our son, his wife and our one-year-old granddaughter over for dinner.  The house was vacuumed, the furniture dusted, all the  breakables were put up and out of one-year-old reach, and a bag of Mojitos was mixed and chilling in the frig.  I was fixing made-from-scratch macaroni and cheese and Bill was grilling pork chops seasoned with a new dry rub he’d found on the Internet.

Shortly before the kids arrived, I wandered into the kitchen to start gathering together all of the ingredients I’d need for the mac and cheese.  Bill was hunched over the counter, busily prepping the meat for the grill.  I looked over his shoulder and watched as he tenderly rubbed the seasoning into the chops.

“What are you doing with the dry rub?” I asked.

“I’m massaging it into the pork,” he said, grabbing another chop.

“I’m sorry, did you say you’re giving the pork chops a massage?”

“Yup.  That’s what the rub recipe said to do.  Wet each side with a little water, sprinkle on the rub and massage it in,” he explained, kneading away at the ½ inch thick piece of pork.

“Okay, there’s something wrong with this picture.  You never give me a massage, but you’ll give one to a pork chop?”

“You know I don’t know how to give good massages,” he said.

“Well you seem to be doing okay on that piece of meat,” I shot back.

“That’s because the pig’s dead and can’t tell the difference between a good massage and a half-assed one,” he argued.  “If it was a live pig, it’d know it was getting a crappy massage!”

“Be that as it may,” I countered, “if anything else in this house gets a massage it better be me and not something we bought at Butcher Bob’s!”