I live with a tendency toward impulsivity and a wide rebellious streak. I experience an instant visceral ‘hell no!’ every time I need to follow a recipe (Or follow orders. Or take direction. Or read instructions. Ok, it’s not pretty.) This means I am infinitely better at throwing together a meal than following a recipe, and baking, with its inherent precision, is pretty much out of the question for me. My husband, James, is the opposite and seems to thrive within the structure of the recipe. He is an equally good cook and baker. James and I do things very differently in the kitchen, but we both need the right ingredients to put together a meal.
This morning, James was singing a Tears for Fears song under his breath. I chuckled and he told me it was a song he loved when he was 15 years old. I’m a couple of years older than James (two years are much more significant when you’re fifteen than when you’re in your 50’s as we are now) and those two years, plus growing up in different parts of the country, meant we had very different musical awakenings. I was never a Tears for Fears fan; I preferred the audacious and somewhat mindless cacophony of the Sex Pistols and the Dead Kennedys. When I asked him to tell me what he loved about this particular song, he realized it contained a kernel of something that would have meaning for him later in life, although he didn’t understand it at the time. Now, a grown up, and a pretty conscious one, he can see that the song held a resonance for him that attracted him but didn’t quite match with who he was at the time. We talked together about the artifacts of our youth and adulthood, the music and food and people to whom we were drawn without knowing why and the ways in which they have continued to feed us throughout the decades. James made us both smile by saying, “We were assembling all of the ingredients of who we would become.”
I know this is an ongoing process, the assembling of the ingredients that make us who we are must continue to change so that we can change too. James and I try to be conscious consumers of our world, choosing ingredients with as much care and presence as we can muster. We are making a gourmet meal together, after all.