This is the column that I thought might finally get me run out of town. I survived the one in the old, printed Herald about calling singer Burl Ives the fat dead guy and the one about death being a great career move for Elvis, but this is the one that might prove to be my ultimate undoing. It wasn’t.

I had flippers for lunch on an April day a couple of years ago. It was flipper pie. It was the first time in more than 50 years since I tasted them. Grandmother Malone used to cook them as a regular part of that Newfoundland rite of spring that is the annual seal hunt or what is left of it. Grandfather had been for many years “at the ice” for Bowring Brothers. As it turns out Grandfather wasn’t a sealer. He was a carpenter and there was lots of carpentry to be done on Bowring’s S.S. Eagle.

Now Grandmother Malone used to cook flippers, or “fippers” as she called them in the ancient way, with a hard pastry and vegetables and slices of lemon cooked right into the hard crust pie. Anyway, I had flipper pie a few springs ago because I wanted to see if the taste would remind me of Grandmother’s house which it did. Taste and smell are very strong memory triggers and for a brief moment I was back in a basement kitchen on Pleasant Street in a long-ago spring where it was nice and warm and where there was a flipper dinner steaming in the oven.

Now I need to tell you that the flipper pie I had last time wasn’t in anyone’s kitchen. It was down at a chic hotel in St. John’s where flippers on the menu attracts the patriotic crowd like me. When you eat flippers these days it’s like you are somehow contributing to our struggle against the world by eating them. I also have to tell you that I didn’t really finish that meal but that too reminded me that back at Grandmother’s is where I ALSO didn’t really finish them. I ate the vegetables and the pastry and the slices of lemon but stayed away from the seal itself. Now there is some risk in telling this little story because it is a still an embattled seal hunt in which we are involved. We have reacted as we should react by defending, what is for us, part of the way of life that helped us cling to this rock in the first place. That is why to say that I don’t really like seal is something said only under my breath because I might be seen as either a traitorous wretch or a fool.

Some years ago, however I was able to shed myself of some of this “I don’t like flipper” angst because of something that happened in the NTV Newsroom. Usually on Fridays, every couple of weeks or so, we had pizza for the staff. We worked like dogs and after a good hard week of work we sent out for something to eat. It’s a nice tradition. On that Friday, though, fresh from my flipper dinner at the hotel I thought it would be a brilliant idea if we brought in some flipper pies instead of pizza. The near universal reply from the newsroom when I mentioned it was a resounding; “Thanks Jim, but no thanks!” Everybody wanted pizza or fish and chips.

I tried playing the patriotic card then although I had no right to but that failed. Nobody wanted anything to do with “fippers” – so I asked them all about there own flipper experiences. One of them put the whole thing about flippers into a perspective I could finally understand. He said every family seems to have a recipe whereby the seal meat is judged by how little it tastes like what it actually is which is seal. “The way Mom cooks it you would never know but that it’s roast beef.” That, of course, begs the question that if that is where the bar is set why don’t you just run down to Sobey’s or Dominion and get some roast beef instead of trimming endless fat and firing on baking soda and throwing in slices of lemon all in the aid of keeping seal from tasting like, well, seal?

Another good point that was made is why do so many people qualify their love of seal by saying that one good meal a year is enough. If it is so great, why don’t they eat it four times a week in the spring? Riddle me that why don’t you. Anyway, that’s it. I am confessing as “a dirty auld St. Johnsman” as Grandmother Malone, who was from Bay Bulls, used to call the townies. This spring it’s steak and kidney pie for me again. Don’t hate me.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca