Wild Games, Togas & Eating Tasty Animals

The stories in this column are true. Averett lives a dull life in rural Southside Virginia with his wife Management, two children and a rotating assortment of goats, dogs, cats, snakes and other local fauna.

Recently we attended a Wild Game Dinner.  Of course, your first question, as well as mine, was, “Is this a dinner for wild game?”  “Will we be visiting wildlife patches to watch the wild things eat?”   Frankly, I had my fill of watching wild game eat when the bear was eating my bees and the deer were eating my apple trees. But once I realized the dinner was going to be held inside I knew that wasn’t it.

Then I wondered, “Is it going to be a wild dinner or a dinner with wild games?”  I have attended a few events that you might consider wild but I can assure you none of them served dinner.   In fact, the events I attended that served a bag of Cheetos were considered to be high class. Occasionally you might run across a bag of chips or a few mushrooms but that was the extent of the hors d’oeuvres.  At one of the parties I attended they must have been playing checkers because a young lady said she was going to jump me before the night was over but who ever heard of a wild checker game. I’ll admit I was intimidated and left before I could play checkers with her.

My bride Management noted that since the dinner was being sponsored by a church, I could probably attend without offending my sensibilities.  Her only concern, as always, was proper attire.   I thought a toga would have been appropriate for any wild games but I somehow misplaced the one I had in my pre-Management days. I have always suspected Management was responsible for its disappearance. It is one of the facts of married life that any clothing that somehow offends, annoys or aggravates the wife will vanish into the domestic equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle. In fact, it is probable they named the Bermuda Triangle after all of the millions of pairs of Bermuda shorts wives have dumped in it.

You can’t object to a wife dumping a pair of plaid Bermuda shorts but when it is your toga or your favorite tee shirt it’s another story.  The only college shirt I ever had was from Confused State University, “where the keys to knowledge are lost forever.” I’ll admit it was a bit worn, a bit faded and a bit thin but it happened to be the only clear memory I had of my time at Confused State. I retrieved it from the trash several times and saved it from being used to wash windows several more times before it vanished. The last time I saw it, it was on my daughter.  As a father, I have to say I found it inappropriate.  First of all, few, if any, of the places that shirt had been are suitable for impressionable children even if the children are over 20 and living on their own.  Most importantly, it was scandalously thin – you could see right through it. I attempted to retrieve it and send it to Bermuda but failed.

I decided to dress up for the dinner. That is, clean jeans and a denim shirt; Management was beautiful as always. As we arrived I began to wonder if I had made a mistake.  The four guys in front of us were wearing camouflage. Camouflage means hunting, fighting or hippies.  If it was going to be a kill-your-own-dinner or fighting I was leaving and if they were hippies I was going to reminisce.

We had a great time at the dinner.  It turned out it was people eating wild game, or as the Animal Rights Wackos call it People Eating Tasty Animals (PETA).  There was squirrel stew, elk chili, wild boar, goose, and fish and all of them were tasty. If God didn’t intend for us to eat cows he wouldn’t have built them out of steaks.  The same goes for all of the other critters; if they weren’t tasty we wouldn’t eat them.