Pig Candy

1. Elevation 690 Ft. In March of 2004, just when the urge to rake out garden beds and plant summer bulbs is too strong to resist, despite the possibility -- the near certainty -- that snow will come again to Philadelphia, I pick up my father and his wife and head south. We drive from their suburban retirement community to Philadelphia International Airport, then fly to Georgia, them in business class, me in coach. In Atlanta, we rent a car and aim for Monticello, a small town surrounded by small towns: Zebulon and Sparta, Musella and Smarr. This is Monti-sello, notchello, seat of Jasper County, home to the fighting Hurricanes, one-time buckle on the Georgia peach-growing belt, birthplace of my father, and the town he shunned for decades, until twenty years ago when he gave in to a childhood dream and bought a farm a few miles from Monticello's town square. Across the seat of our full-size sedan, I see my father, George Newton Funderburg, grow more energetic with each mile. He looks out the passenger-side window as big-box malls trickle away, replaced by pine forest and signs for barbecue. My father is a handsome man. I tend to look at him through a lens in which surface and shape hardly register, except as conveyers of emotion, but I can see that at seventy-seven, he has barely a crease in his skin, much less a wrinkle. He is still in the vicinity of his peak height, five feet eleven inches, and his close-cropped hair, never grown long enough to complete a kink, is slightly more salt than pepper. His face and body are well-proportioned, except for the large-belly/no-posterior dilemma that plagues many men after a certain age, and his gray-blue eyes and meticulously flossed, brushed, and later-life-orthodonticized teeth sparkle with charm and good humor when the spirit moves him. Down here, most people look at his skin, the color of faded parchment, and call it "high yellow." Up north, most people assume he's white. Dad interrupts his own reverie with projections: how we'll occupy ourselves on this trip, what changes we'll encounter, what will have stayed the same. He anticipates, accurately, that we will find his 126-acre farm-cum-vacation home in pristine condition, thanks to the attentions of Troy Johnson, a friend and fellow retiree who watches out for the house and three ponds, the ancient grove of pecan trees that yield seemingly on whim, and several well-manicured pastures Dad rents out to the cattle-farming Howard brothers, forty-eight-year-old identical twins named Albert and Elbert. Down south, spring has advanced. Pear trees are in full bloom, naturalized daffodils stripe the just-greening pastures with yellow, and deep red camellias dot walkways and yards, sentries at every door. Sweaters need to be kept nearby but not on, windows are cranked open to ensure a cross breeze. We make good time from the airport to the farm, just over an hour, and Dad and I don't bother to unpack before we turn our attention to the two items on our agenda: roasting a pig and getting him some chemo. First, the pig. In January, my father read a newspaper article that chronicled the author's experiment with cooking a seventy-pound pig in a Cuban-American-designed roasting box calledLa Caja China['ka-ha 'cheY-na]: a simple plywood cart lined with metal and designed to suspend coals above rather than below the meat. The outcome, sweet and savory, succulent and crisp, earned the paradoxical moniker "pig candy." Pig candy? Dad ordered the largest modelCajafrom its Miami manufacturer and had it sent to the farm. Clever inventions and well-prepared food both make my father's list of favorite things. Together they were irresistible. My father has always displayed a fascination for crafty mechanics, for improved ways to clean and fix and open and close. Over the years he has plied Diane, Margaret, and me, hiFunderburg, Lise is the author of 'Pig Candy' with ISBN 9781416547662 and ISBN 1416547665.