Intermission

This blog is a blog about food, of course. But it is also, implicitly, a blog about social connection—about creating meals that we share with others, about food as a communal experience; about cooking with and for and because of, about smell and taste and texture that we experience with rather than alone. After all, what are we doing here, you and I, if not creating a shared space, a mutual reality?

Pull up a chair. Let me tell you something.

A friend of mine was recently remembering his dad, who passed away a few years ago, and I overheard an acquaintance tell him two sentences that have been echoing in my head ever since. She said something like: The people we love are concepts in our heads. They live on as long as we remember them.

Which is true, right? In a profound, ringing kind of way.

You can hear them. What they would say. Or see them and how they would look. Corner of the mouth pulling up into a smile. Eyes that crease at the corners. But more than that—you can feel them like a warmth, a presence, a concept in your head that's as real as anything (because everything, when you think about it, is a concept...our whole world is filtered through our minds...so why should one mental representation be any less real than another? There they are, nestled between our memory of yesterday and our thoughts of tomorrow).

So next time you sit down to a meal, bring them. The father or grandfather who passed away. The faithful companion who rested his head on your knee for eleven years. The friend who you somehow lost and the ex who you never stopped loving. Invite them to dinner. Lean into them. Breathe.

Feel that?

Right there.

Concepts in our heads. Food on the table.

Live on.