Where to start. Where to stop. Both
are so important in so many aspects of a life. Dating. Sex. Marriage.
Child-rearing. Cooking a meal. Eating a meal. Telling a shaggy dog story.
“The beginning,” you might say,
when queried about where to start anything.
I would respond, “The beginning of what? And can you be sure where the
beginning is?”
The beginning of a story, or a
relationship, or even a meal, can be purely subjective. I have a pair of
friends – a couple, who love each other deeply.
The biggest dispute they have in their lives together is at exactly what
point their long-standing platonic friendship wandered into romantic territory.
He says it was the overnight trip
to Vegas, where they shared a first, slightly drunken kiss at the roulette table.
She swears it was several weeks later, in Yosemite, when they made love
stone-cold sober. Who’s right? Who’s
wrong? Neither. Both.
For him, when he finally stole a
kiss from the girl of his dreams, that was the start of his love story. No
matter that they were in a noisy casino, adrift in tequila and cigarette smoke.
He’d kissed her, and that was what mattered.
For her, though, until they were
alone in a musty rental cabin in the forest, absent roulette wheels and
alcohol, a kiss was just a kiss. Though
she treasured their little lip-lock, what happened in Vegas definitely stayed in
Vegas. Their love, for her, began in solitude, surrounded by majestic nature
and the wind humming through the trees.
Beginnings are tricky.
Endings can be even more fraught
with dispute. No doubt there are millions of people in the world at this very
writing, whose relationships have ended without them even knowing it. A partner
has checked out or cheated, closed the door to their heart, and is preparing to
move on.
At some point in the future, the
unsuspecting jilted party will look back and try and pinpoint the exact moment
their love ended. All of them will venture a guess. Some will be right. The
vast majority will probably be way off the mark.
Endings are tricky, too, and harder
to pull off gracefully and with loving compassion.
Today, we’re dealing with
beginnings. This story – my story – will
begin at the beginning. Not in Vegas or a cabin in Yosemite. My story is the story of food, of kitchens,
of meals and large tables full of people. This is the story of food and begins
at the beginning of everything.
Cavemen.
Anthropologists date the beginning
of human social structure – the germination of the proverbial “village”, as it
were – from the advent of the campfire. Our cultural and social traditions, our
language, or concept of family and belonging, turned from pack-like to
communal, not when our predecessors banded together to kill the wooly mammoth,
but rather when they gathered around an open flame to cook it.
These same anthropologists
hypothesize that the minute we stopped merely huddling in the cold, dark caves,
sharing our raw kills, but came together in a circle to cook and eat it around
the warmth of the fire, we began to become who we are – in the sociological
seeds for our humanness were planted in the ashes of those blazing open flames,
and took root in ways that shaped our attitudes and experiences since. Those roaring flames licking up at the chunks
of red meat over those fires forged our ideas of community, family, parenthood
and, perhaps especially, of food.
