Until you taste their bread, you don’t really know them

"I trust everything is good in your part of the world."

The recipient of the email in which wrote that sentence lives far away, diagonally across the country from me.  Jim moved there a few years ago.  Every once in a while, we trade emails in which we share awful groaners.  Like this one that he had sent me a while ago:

Jim is much older than I am.  So, naturally, I was/am concerned about him in the time of the coronavirus.

In his reply, Jim writes that he is healthy, and adds, "I haven’t had much in the way of puns for awhile so have not sent you any."

There are a couple of posts in which I have referred to this old friend, who was a good neighbor for a few years.

The following is an edited version of a post from August 2012.
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It seems like during crises in the recent past, the younger generations texted, or posted on Facebook, or emailed sympathetic messages, whereas the older generations who lived close by went beyond that and asked if they could help out by bring over food.  The younger generations who lived close by didn't think about the food aspect.

Of course, with the coronavirus, it is a whole new paradigm of the young and the old keeping to ourselves and engaging in virtual interactions.  Damn COVID-19!

My best memory of a neighbor sharing food left me with a deep appreciation of the neighbor and the idea of sharing food.  I was in high school when my grandmother died.  In the traditional brahminical context in which I grew up, no celebrations for a year, which meant that we kids wouldn't get to eat all those wonderful goodies that mother would have otherwise made.

Well, fully aware of this, our neighbor then sent across home-made sweets for every major religious event that entire year.  Not just a couple of pieces, but a tray full of tasty eats every single time.

The neighbor's actions were immensely louder than powerful than the most commonly expressed phrase of "I am sorry to hear about your loss."

Of course, the situation doesn't have to be mournful in order to share food.  We can do it on good days too.

One of my best experiences when I reconnected with old school mates was when they invited me over to have food at their homes.  Equally wonderful was when I got some of them to come over to my parents' home to spend some time together and break that proverbial bread.

These experiences of interacting with, and understanding, friends is not the same as interactions with friends on Facebook.  There is simply no comparison at all, which is what the NY Times' David Carr found out a few months ago when he was invited to a dinner with a bunch of people with whom he had had extensive online interactions.  The host had baked the bread that Carr found to be very tasty, and he writes that the"connection in an online conversation may seem real and intimate, but you never get to taste the bread."

As I have often blogged (like here,) interactions on Facebook seem far from the real and substantive friendships that most of us prefer.

Carr notes:

you can follow someone on Twitter, friend them on Facebook, quote or be quoted by them in a newspaper article, but until you taste their bread, you don’t really know them.

When my neighbor Carol was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, I took food over a couple of times.  Before a road trip, I took Jim and their son a salad that I had made.  Jim asked me whether I wanted to visit with Carol.  I followed him to the bedroom, but she was asleep.

That was my final visit with her. Soon after that, Jim sold the house and moved. 

You cannot virtualize all these from the real world.