Published: November 25, 2009 02:24 pm      

Cheese, a great motivator in my life

My wife and I spent a few days last week at the Gethsemani Trappist monastery near Bardstown, Ky. — the home and burial place of Thomas Merton. It gave us a chance to clear away the clutter from our heads and realign our priorities.

It also gave me a chance to eat cheese. The monks make it there and it is served with every meal, including breakfast. Eating cheese with oatmeal may not sound civil, but trust me, it’s great.

Since I was born in Wisconsin 16 years after the Green Bay Packers were established, I was just naturally a Cheese Head. I don’t remember seeing people wearing hats that looked like wedges of cheddar back then, but anyone who was born in America’s Dairyland is invested with patriotic feelings toward cheese. It’s in their DNA.

In those days, Wisconsin was a Mecca of small creameries. There was at least one in every town. When I was in the second grade, the family of one of my school chums operated one just a few blocks from my house. After school we often congregated at his house to play games in the creamery parking lot.

The place always smelled of clabbered milk and sometimes my buddy’s mom would invite us in for milk and cookies. Occasionally she would pass around a dish of cheese curds, marble-size remnants from the most recent cheese-making project.

The cheese was made in great stainless steel vats, pressed into wheel-shaped molds the size of car tires, coated with paraffin and stored for aging in the creamery cooler.

The curds were scraped out of the vat when the job was done. I think they donated most of them to the Indian school on the nearby reservation. I doubt they ever thought about packaging and selling them in those days.

Today, of course, packages of cheese curds sell for a premium at gas stations and souvenir shops all across Wisconsin. Whenever I travel in my home state I always buy some. That’s what real Cheese Heads, do.

Back in the second grade, one day after school I wandered over to the creamery to see what was going on only to find the parking lot empty. My buddy appeared at the door and motioned me inside.

“I gotta work,” he said, pointing to the uncleaned cheese vat. “You wanna help?” Why not, I shrugged and walked with him to the vat. He handed me a long wooden-handled scraper and showed me how to remove the cheese from the sides of the vat. When I returned home two hours later, I carried with me a small box of cheese curds.

I quickly learned that they made cheese every Friday and found an excuse to show up at the creamery door after school. Sometimes one or two other kids from our class would help out and we all took home cheese.

Later I realized the creamery owner’s son was simply and skillfully playing the role of Tom Sawyer with us. Cleaning up at the creamery was his job. Getting us to want to help was sheer serendipity. Small packages of cheese curds were a small price to pay to lighten his load.

Fast forward to last week. We got to the monastery in time for dinner. Baked beans, salad, vegetable soup, fresh-baked bread and thick slabs of cheese filled out the menu. I went back for a second slice of cheese.

The retreat was refreshing. For a few days my wife and I were able to imitate the lives of the monks who live there. We rose at 5 a.m. for Lauds, the second prayer session of the day. (The first is called Vigils and since it happens at three-fifteen in the morning, I elected not to get up for it.) Each of the seven prayer sessions are chanted, and the music stays with you long after. Daily Mass followed prayer, and after that, breakfast.

The Trappists revere silence, and so we ate most of our meals in quiet contemplation. I can’t say that our lives will change dramatically because of our time there, but at least we came back home with fresh eyes and a lightened heart to resume our daily tasks.

We stopped at the gift shop on our way out at the end of our retreat, and I bought a small wheel of Gethsemani cheese. The next morning I had a slice of it with breakfast.

Ward Degler is a Zionsville writer and artist. E-mail him at wdegler@att.net.