I had to buy a ham

I am standing at a huge freezer counter maybe ten feet long and it is filled with hams, bone-in, water added, spiral cut, shank, butt, shoulder, boiled, cured, smoked, raw and fully cooked.  Meat has never been my strong point and I face cooking  it with only scanty information and experience. My mother always bought the ham for Easter so I never bothered to learn ham language because she was always supposed to be there to cook the damn thing.  She and my father would travel to Cuba City, Wisconsin, home of Weber's Meat Market, a fine German establishment and purchase a fresh ham, the pale, pink color of a rose's heart.  She would  inspect that chunk of  meat and sometimes  request a new cut not liking how the fat veined or some other mysterious process.

There is a group of men in white butcher coats next to me and one man has that boss tone to his voice and he is lecturing the others and I am thinking they are student butchers and he is the ham master . He turns to me and says, "What are you looking for, m'am?"  A good ham, I reply, and I hear my mother's voice echo within my own. The gentleman wants to help me, and the novice butchers will learn something valuable about old ladies buying meat.  I bought the Fleur-de-Lis brand name as he advised.  His father  was some sort of meat know-it-all and he bought this ham every Easter and the family would talk about it for days.  And this is what I want, my family talking about ham for days. And the other winning factor was the name, Fleur de Lis. The Dubuque Packing plant in my hometown was a huge pig-smelly place that employed 3500 people in its heyday and used this French logo for their prize hams.  Everyone I know over the age of 50 worked at the Pack, except me, I stood at my cash register in my aqua blue plastic smock at the S.S. Kresge's after school each day.  Ah, the 60's . . .