Premium

The boast of premium is on everything we buy. Premium says my recent package of brake pads. Premium says the six pack of beer. My work shoes it seems were made of premium leather by premium Chinese workers. We had premium sausage links for supper.

As I remember sausage links, by definition they were not premium. Like the ones my grandfather fashioned in his summer kitchen composed of every scrap and offal he could lay his hands on, pulverize into indistinguishable bits, stuffed into a body bag and tied off with string. Sausage he distributed around to his family to fry up with a good pat of bacon grease. The challenge was always to identify what weed/sawdust/sinew/testicles/eyeball preceded the creation of this farmer’s homemade sausage. Sausage by definition is not a premium product, if quite the opposite. The term wurst comes to mind as exceptionally truthful.

I yearn for an advertiser to say, “Dear customer, what we sell is an average product,” “an ordinary product.” It seems the better Christian response is to sell and desire a “so-so product.” An ethical element is involved along the lines of Midwest honesty and accommodation, whose standard is good-enough. To counter the boast of premium this, premium that, replaced by the sincerity of “good enough.”

I love Garrison Keillor as a mentor and exponent of Midwest values, the city father of Lake Woebegone, but the truth of his boast “where the children are above average” just isn’t so. At the heart of the Midwest is the collective faith in the standard bell-curve where being average is at the top of that statistical anthill. Dead center average, being at the precise summit of what is good enough to serve on this planet of sundry fates, revolutions, plagues, deaths, starvations, dictators, mass extinctions, where being plain-jane ordinary is pretty darn nice. The Midwest has no mountains, no sea coast, even the landscape is called plain, we know the joy of being average aside from a stray tornado, malcontent blizzard, miscellaneous thunder storm. We are bred to be average. We do get winters that linger, sometimes there is high water in Woebegone, but the rest of the time our weather and our kids get average grades, go to average colleges, live average lives in homes that never show up in Architectural Digest costing 1.75 million. Being average means the plumbing works most of the time and the water’s good to drink, which on a world scale is bloody fabulous.

Against this faith in being in the middle of the multitude is every other package of every other thing saying premium. Like as not at the top of the box, up front, even before that self-same box tells you what’s in it, it brags of premium to whatever it is.

I yearn for a bag of potato chips to say “plain darn average potato chips.” A potato chip is supposed to be average. Our mom did homemade potato chips under the boxelder trees in the evening of a humid July twilight. She had cleaned out the last of the potato cellar on the knowledge by the next week we would be eating new potatoes from the field.

Eating the last of the cellar potatoes was a kind of ritual to do honor to our survival and to those grungie old tubers so wrinkled and sprouted any decent mom would have thrown them out. Not my mom. That would be waste. Waste was a sin before adultery was a sin, if still not so entirely dastardly as stealing a neighbor’s asparagus. This lesson she taught to her boy chillen, that adultery was a lot easier than it ought to be, explaining how it got mentioned in the Big Ten. ‘Course being farmboys in the first place we thought sex with an actual female was the premium product.

For our mama it was too wasteful to throw away potatoes even if they were wrinkled as raisins. On that summer night under the boxelders she set out the fry kettle, soaked the potatoes until they plumped up, dried them awhile on an elm plank, this her recipe for redemption. Our mama did a lot of seasoning with elm. She laid chicken out on green elm, same for Swiss steak, and potatoes. Green elm is still not cited as a seasoning in Joy of Cooking.

The smell of potato chips frying on a summer night is about as intoxicating as any smell not attached to black brassieres. That smell drifted and eddied through the farmyard, it slithered into the barn, announcing that we were to have a supper of way below average potato chips.

Maybe it’s just the farmkid in me that believes so abundantly in average. Against the world of options give me an average motel room, average car, average beer, average IQ, average life span, give me the average god as doesn’t damn anything, with average angels and an average Bible saying average things. Give me average weather, average politicians, average kids.

Today I bought premium beer, premium gas, premium hot dogs, I listened to a radio station that offered premium music. I heard premium news advertised by an auto dealer selling premium cars. What I really want is average.