A special wish for you today:May your salad dressing be tangy, perfectly distributed, and utterly delicious.
Not long ago, I visited friends in rural Virginia. I cherish them because we have little in common other than our like-mindedness. Susan, a historian, is 11 years older than I am and has four children to my zero. I grew up among atheist Soviet Jews; she among evangelical Christians. Susan was home-schooled and married Pete, a pastor. I’ve remained unmarried for so long even my mother has surrendered.
The family lives in Christ — if my visit overlaps with a Sunday, I join the congregation Pete ministers to in the church on the family property, an old-school Virginia holding of corn, cotton and soybeans, with lots reserved for the family farm, a small publishing house and a bed-and-breakfast.
I love Pete and Susan because they’re spiritual and religious in the way few people seem to be, in my religion and theirs. For them, faith is an experience of learning, welcome and community, with inquiry and debate in lieu of dogma, exclusion and enforcement. They make no big deal of the visiting Jew in the pews.
For me, sitting through a sermon on the Book of Revelation still feels strange, but talking afterward — about whether Christianity approves of tough love (yes, in the Prophetic tradition) and why Susan bakes five loaves of buttermilk bread on the Sundays communion is offered (Christ broke bread, not wafers) — feels like home. Their congregation is as small as you’d expect it to be.
My most recent visit, however, tested the connection between us. Entering the house one afternoon, I could tell something was wrong. Pete was cleaning in a way that didn’t seem to be about cleaning. Susan, who generally gets up at 5 a.m. and by late morning has done what most of us have done in a day, looked through me and said, “I need to sit down and watch a rerun of something.” She did, eventually, explain that the night before, they’d received unwelcome news about one of their children. I waited for her to continue, but that’s all she said.
I’m from a family whose boundaries were so faint that my mother used to scroll through the photos on my phone “just to see what you’ve been up to.” And so my first impulse was to blurt out, “What happened?” I caught myself just in time. Susan and Pete had always been very open with me. There was a reason they didn’t want to do the same now, and just then, not asking — making peace with not knowing — seemed like the more loving act than scratching for a way in.
But I didn’t want to utter a platitude and tiptoe out. That felt wrong, too. So I said the only other thing I could think of: “Can I make lunch?”
Susan, who does all the family cooking, sighed. “I’ve been meaning to make a big salad for weeks,” she said. Settled, then.
Their youngest, who still lives at home, wanted nothing to do with a salad, so Susan said she would make her a grilled cheese. For the next 15 minutes, a house that is never at rest — four animals around us, 50 horses, sheep, goats and ducks outside — fell silent. Pete, lost in thought, made snacks for his wife to eat later while she watched TV; Susan, lost in thought, made lunch for her daughter; and I, lost in my task, made salad for Susan: salad mix, broccoli, cauliflower, sweet peppers, brussels sprouts, radishes, carrots and feta.
The only sound was my peeling, chopping and scraping and a kitchen at work: the oven exhaling; a pan emerging to rest on the grills of the burners; the scrape of a spatula. The three of us entered the most beautiful silence — composed, rhythmic and filled with a kind of grace, perhaps because Susan was grateful to have food made for her, and I grateful to be something other than a nuisance. Where just minutes before I’d felt only awkwardness, now I felt something approaching elation. If I were a believer, I would have said God was there. When the salad was ready, Susan embraced me. And what was an opportunity for an unforeseen boundary turned into a moment of greater intimacy than before. Susan and Pete might have called it fellowship.
The power of food — of cooking, of cooking together — is its ability to briefly blot out almost any pain. It is as elemental as pain itself — from nothing you make something that will sustain you, and people you love, into tomorrow. It will last only till then, but tomorrow, you can do it again. One of the things I love about the family’s church is that it encourages you to experience God on your own terms; food, then, is my faith. The experience of making it, serving it and eating it can be sacred. There aren’t many things in this world immune from ill will — for me, a “well-covered” table, as we say it in Russian, is one of them.
This Thanksgiving, as my family celebrates the 29th anniversary of our arrival in this country — a deep Reagan-Bush time that now seems like a liberal’s fantasy of conservatism — my father will trot out the dishes that make the conflicts in my family go still for several hours as our eyes roll ecstatically back in our heads. America has not always felt like home, but it ails so badly now that I don’t feel the luxury of the casual alienation that is the gift of sweeter times.
And so I pray, in my secular way, that across a million kitchens where our divided people gather this Thanksgiving, instead of saying what won’t help anyone by being said, someone in charge of a kitchen-sink salad asks someone from the other side to help her figure out the dressing. I used olive oil, honey-mustard dressing, lime juice, crushed red pepper flakes and oregano — the best of what there was at hand.
Boris Fishman is author of the novels “A Replacement Life” and “Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo,” and a forthcoming nonfiction family history told through recipes.
via {ny times}
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