Over at the Travis McGee Reader there’s a picture of New Dog Libby with a big beef bone, and it led to a discussion among the voices in my head on the topic, “Man, Little Bear would think he’d died and gone to the meat department.” At which point Mr. Suburban Man started strategizing, and Crusty Desert Hermit started listing objections:
A: It’s too complicated. You can’t get just one, because then there’s conflict. But if you get two Ghost will take his out somewhere and hide it, and then he’ll want LB’s and again there’s conflict.
B: It’s impossible. The butcher at the IGA never has bones available for non-cronies. Or perhaps non-personal-customers.
Which brings us to the subject of cappabar, one of the disadvantages of life near a very small, dying* town. You can’t get bones at the IGA for the same reason you can’t get jeans at the thrift store: They get skimmed off the inventory and sold off-books.
Cappabar is a word that stuck with me from reading Patrick O’Brian novels, and given the frequency with which the O’Brian quote appears in online definitions I’m beginning to think it may have originated with him. “…disposing of His Majesty’s property was an immemorial practice among His Majesty’s servants … and in the Navy it went by the name of cappabar.” – Patrick O’Brian, “The Mauritius Command”.
Basically it’s pilferage for further sale, and given its pervasiveness in certain corners of the …shall we say informal… market I can only assume it’s winked at by management. If you want used jeans in this town, you don’t go to the thrift store. You go see the lady with the thrift-store day job who sells them out of her RV at the flea market. If you want beef bones, you don’t go to the butcher at the IGA. I still don’t know what you do for that.
But in a life on the economic edge, knowing how to acquire the things you need is an essential skill. And those things are not always best available in the places you’d think. Mr. Suburban Man is still sometimes blindsided by this.
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*and it’s apparently still dying, despite relatively recent encouraging news. I learned last week that this town’s one-and-only bank is closing, which will make it rather difficult for surviving businesses to…do business.
You can get bones by the bucketful a your local meat cutter. That’s the people who will cut an wrap your half a beef or whatever. In your neck of the woods there should be at least one not too far away. The last time I had a 1/4 cow cut up and wrapped, I got so many bones that I had to share them around the neighborhood.
You’re right, Rustynail. Raising a steer for slaughter is a very common practice around here. But the nearest cutter is about 40 miles away. As is the nearest decent vet, BTW.
Actually most grocery store meat dept’s no longer butcher meat, they get it pre-cut in boxed form. Yes, they still have to slice the blocks of meat into steaks or chops, but the only bones in the boxes get sliced and sold as part of the meat cuts – they simply don’t have the big leg etc,bones in the store anymore..