George Lang
Listen to George’s story – read by JP Relph
Mother taught me to fry an egg when I was fifteen. She was a terrible cook. She considered all forms of housework domestic burdens cast upon her by Society, whose rules and customs she did not respect. A working mother of four, she bore the brunt of the rise of our war-honed agri-business, its flatulent hype, standardization, shrink-wrap packaging, early stages of the nefarious fast-food industry whose calculated super-sizing perpetrates on humans what some object to on ducks and geese, for the sake of foie gras. Yet Mother was right about eggs. And this egg lesson was the first of three ordained once she saw the incipient effects of pubescence on me. The second, to sew a button. The third carries me to this moment: ten-finger typing. “This way,” she opined, “when you end up with a woman, you’ll need her for nothing other than herself”. The worldly reader will have noticed: Mother omitted another want which enslaves many men to women. There was nothing, she knew, she could teach to help that.
George Lang is a retired Canadian academic, a poet and a translator from a variety of languages. His work has appeared in Ellipse, Beloit Poetry Journal, California Review, New Verse Review, Big Fat Toad, Haus A Rest and Bloomin’ Onion.
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