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.
***************************************************

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.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall

tRump and his toadies are obsessed with the wall.  That is not news to you or me.  What surprised me was the intensity with with some of his toadies in my neighborhood brought that "wall" to the very fences that mark our community.

Wrote one in an email to the 'hood:

"Have you looked at some of the fences ... lately? What is the point ... when ANYONE ... can WALK into a backyard area, through a broken fence. It’s embarrassing; it’s ugly; and it does not show respect for the other neighbors living here."

A wall or a fence is a statement about ourselves as much as it is about the others.  This is what Robert Frost wanted us to think about in the layers of human complexity that he presents in Mending Wall.  He writes there:

Before I build a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offense.

Neither tRump nor his toadies care to think about "what I was walling in or walling out / and to whom I was like to give offense."

I would like to email Frost's poem to my neighbors.  And for all of us to bring to a neighborhood meeting our understanding of the lessons that we learnt from the poem.

But then I need to remind myself that I am a brown-skinned immigrant with a funny accent, and who looks like an Arab.  For all I know, the toadies might rally outside my home and chant "send him back!"

So, instead, I will end this post with Robert Frost's Mending Wall.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down. 'I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'

There goes the neighborhood!

A summer potluck was one of the many charming aspects of the neighborhood where I live.

(From an email a few years ago)

Was.

We did not have one in the summer of 2016.
Nothing in the summer of 2017.
And there are no plans afoot for a gathering in the summer of 2018 either.

You know why!

Last summer, a neighbor realized that I was no longer her friend on Facebook--this was back when I was active there.  She thought it was recent; little did she know that I had unfriended her well into the campaign season in 2016.

She asked me whether she and/or her husband offended me in any way.

I calmly explained to her that trump's election has changed everything.  "It is not about Republican politics," I reminded her.  After all, in the neighborhood we have always had hardcore Republicans and Democrats.  "trump is different," I remember telling her.

She attempted to defend the candidate that she loudly and vocally supported from the time he launched his candidacy.  "Give him some time," she said.

"I don't want us to debate about him."  I forced myself to be polite.

A couple of days ago, I was sweeping the sidewalk by my home.  Two older neighbors stopped by with the typical American humor.  "You have some great strokes with the broom," one joked. 

And then we talked serious stuff too.  "When Obama was the president, many of our neighbors constantly complained about Obama this, and Obama that.  Now, you don't see or hear anybody publicly complaining about trump, right?  People are afraid.  It is like Germany in the 1930s," the white neighbor complained.

I don't see any summer potluck possible as long as he is in the White House.  And then it will take years to bridge the divide between neighbors.  Meanwhile, older neighbors will die, and others will move away.  We will barely have anybody with any memory of the summer potluck gatherings that we once used to have.

I am not sure how we will overcome all these.

A wild goose chase is what life is, too

Every single dish that my neighbors had on the menu at dinner last night at their home was simply delicious, as always.  "The best food at the best restaurant in town" is how I, yet again, referred to the delightful dishes they put together.

One was a new item on the menu that I hadn't ever had in all these years of neighborly exchanges.  It was an eggplant dish.  The aroma from that as I walked towards the kitchen made me drool even before I had laid my eyes on it.  If the brain is the most important sex organ, the nose is perhaps the most important food organ for the all important sense of smell it provides us.

As we sat down to eat, they thanked the lord for for the food and remembered the fallen soldiers.  I thanked them for the food and friendship.  A friendship over a decade, despite our ages, and different perspectives on religion and politics, leave alone our respective cultural backgrounds.

As I greedily took my second, and a third, helping, I asked them if they could guess the geographic home of eggplants.  And then I pointed to myself.

"Oh, India."

It was damn tasty.  I was curious, as ever: "How did you make this eggplant dish?"

The response was a simple one with which I am all too familiar: "Oh, I made it up as I went along."

"Yes, the best kind of cooking" I said.

We agreed that one needs to know a bit before we get to making up things as we go about in the cooking.  A certain idea of the terrain.  When I don't know, I stay away from experimenting.  Cooking is no wild goose chase.

With a sense of contentment, I picked up the latest issue of the New Yorker for my bed-time reading.  The photo-essay on the Central Asian rivers appealed to me as the right kind of soothing read before drifting off to sleep.  I was wrong; it provided way more intellectual stimulation than I would have guessed.

The caption by the side of a photograph of a wild goose said:

A "wild goose chase" was originally a horse race with no fixed course: the rider in the lead improvised the route, until someone passed him.

How fascinating!

Something new every day.  Yesterday, it was more than one new thing.  An eggplant dish for the nose and tongue, and the "wild goose chase" for the most important sex organ!

The salad at the dinner. I forgot to take a photo of the eggplant dish!

On Food, Friendships, and Facebook

Before my (un)professional colleagues shut me up at work, I used to take, every once in a while, cookies, brownies, and cakes to work, and share with a few--students and faculty.  One faculty colleague remarked that sharing food--especially food made at home--rarely happens anymore in America.  This contemporary state was unlike his own experiences when he was younger, and he argued that the reason was the price of food: it is now way less expensive than before and, therefore, we don't care about food itself that much anymore.

It is true that food is in plenty and accounts for a much smaller share of the household budget compared to even a generation ago.  But, that could also be the basis for arguing that one would then expect more people to share food with others, right?

This issue came up when I met with my friends, "D" and "J" over lunch (thanks for the lunch, "D.")  We caught up with our lives, which included a great deal of unfortunate developments, including deaths in the families.  "D" remarked that the response across the generations was sharply different--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.

I told her that sharing food with friends and neighbors is rapidly becoming a dying tradition.  "Literally" said "J" whose mother recently passed away.

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.

It was not the sweets per se.  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:

Now, he could have told that story in a blog post or in an e-mail chain, but it became a very different story because we were tasting what he talked about. The connection in an online conversation may seem real and intimate, but you never get to taste the bread. To people who lead a less-than-wired existence, that may seem like a bit of a “duh,” but I spend so much interacting with people on the Web that I have become a little socially deficient.

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.

I suppose living in a neighborhood with a whole bunch of people much older than me means that I am lucky in having a lot more food-sharing people around me.  "J" and "S" routinely invite me over to their place, and sometimes it is when "J" does that tastiest steaks I have ever had.  "ML" brought me lemon bars that were simply fantastic.  The cupcakes from "B" were awesome.

A few months ago, my neighbor Carol was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.  A couple of times, I took food over to them.  At the last one, before my road trip, I took her husband and son a salad that I had made.  Her husband, Jim, asked me whether I wanted to visit with Carol.  I followed him to the bedroom, but she was asleep.

Carol died a couple of days ago.