My idea of a “fancy night out” wasn’t entirely determined by period movies. A good chunk was my parents.
Growing up, my parents would occasionally fancy themselves up for special occasions and go out. My older sister was left in charge, $60 was left in the foyer for Dinos (or Michelli’s if we want pizza that night instead of subs) and my parents would head out. My father actually owned a tuxedo and one of my clearest memories of those times was my dad in a matching cummerbund and bowtie, with a chained ribbon around his neck and a smaller version on my mom’s.
As I got older and I ingested more media, visions of what one actually did in a tux and pearls clarified beyond “go off and leave me with my sisters.” Images of Thomas and Martha Wayne getting dolled up for the movies seemed old fashioned because that’s common and casual these days. Going to a concert also didn’t feel appropriate because I’d been to or seen rock and folk concerts. If there was a tuxedo in that crowd, it had to have been either a prank or a prop.
The opera or symphony, however… THAT felt like the kind of thing you dressed up for. The period pieces were definitely old-timey, but the buildings still exist and walking into one makes you feel like you ought to dress the part.
I’ve gotten back into watching the classic “Twilight Zone” episodes lately. They are the right mixture of length and creep factor that I like to unwind with after work. I’ll usually crash out in my rocking chair, pour a little whiskey, put on an episode, and try to make Cleo share my legs with a knitting project.
Yes, I’ve got a thing for being cozy.
My favorite episodes are the ones that feature Ed Wynn (“One for the Angels”) or Jack Klugman (“A Passage for Trumpet” and “A Game of Pool,”) in addition to “The Changing of the Guard.” It’s pretty easy to see why, beyond Rod Serling’s work being patently incredible. I’m still thinking about legacies and impacts, and those episodes are about people coming to grips with theirs.
Everything we do impacts those around us in some way, so even when we act to create a legacy, we don’t (and can’t) always know what shape that legacy may take.
One of the banquet cooks at my winery has been learning to be a tattoo artist and not long ago got the go-ahead to find some clients to train on. After working with pen and paper and then fake skin, he’s got to do 50 pieces on other people under the supervision of his teachers. Offering yourself to be trained on can seem jarring, but it’s a wonderful way to get new work done for cheap- and if you know the artist (and where they work), it makes it more comfortable.
The reference picture and Tyler’s treatment for the tattoo
As I leaned back in the chair and Tyler put the stencil on me, his teacher walked up and said “Aw fer… you’re killing me, Tyler.” That’s kinda like hearing your surgeon go “Oops” just before you go under… but he followed it up by looking at me and saying “Friggin’ overachiever, this guy… made progress faster than anyone else, leans hard into everything, and now this. Tyler, how many does this make for you?”
Tyler chuckles and grins slightly under his beard at the praise and says “Well, uh… this is actually my first on someone else.”
Tyler and I are work acquaintances. We get along fine in the kitchen but don’t chat much. My head is always down in my pastry work and he buzzes about prepping for banquets. We both share in the community that kitchens everywhere create. This was the first time I saw him come alive, leaning into what he was passionate about and fully engaged.
Throughout the session, his teachers came over with praise and sent other students to watch him work. It was clearly his calling. I leaned back and couldn’t help but remember my squadmates eating my first pastries from home and saying “Why are you on an ambulance, Matt? You should be doing this!” I remember my therapist warning me not to walk away from the culinary life so lightly- “Matt, this is your calling. You come alive when you talk about it. Your eyes light up.”
The tattoo came out perfectly, and I get to be part of Tyler’s story about finding his calling, just like his work gets to be a part of me.
A Simple Dice Game
I think it’s got to be the feeling that makes dice games so enjoyable. I’ve always been a bit of a fidgeter, and the feel, look, and sound of rolling dice signals a particularly fun kind of gameplay. It “feels” more aggressively random and chancey watching dice skitter across a surface before coming to rest than pulling cards out of a deck or watching a marble whirl around a roulette wheel.
After my tattoo, I wandered into Montavilla Brew Works for a pint and they had a few of my favorites on tap. Montavilla Brew Works and its neighbor Threshold Brewing are where I got a make a small mark on the Portland beer scene. Montavilla in particular has several beers inspired by The Lord of the Rings, such as their “Palantir” Dark Ale, “Old Fellowship” Barleywine, “Peregrin” Palo Santo Wood-Aged Porter, and “Extra Special Baggins” Bitter.
Some time ago, I reached out to them with a suggestion- either an imperial stout as dark, strong, and evil as Morgoth, or a beer as bright, light, and cheery as Tom Bombadil. A few weeks later, they released their “Bombadil” Bright IPA. I might have liked the stout better, but I was thrilled to have played a part however small.
Today, as I walked in, Morgan the bartender came straight up to me with a grin and said “YOU sir, have caused an UPROAR.” She then turned around and shouted to the room “Hey all! It’s him, DICE GAME GUY!” and at least five people yelled in response “DICE GAME GUY!”
The “dice game” in question is part game, part logic/deduction puzzle called “Petals Around the Rose” when I learned it in college. It’s a simple but frustrating little challenge where one person who already knows the game rolls dice repeatedly and another person guesses the “answer” for a given roll. The object of the game is to figure out what rule is being followed to get each answer. When I first played it, my friend Jessica drove me nuts for three days trying to figure it out.
Some weeks ago, after Morgan and another patron were playing Yahtzee during a slow point in the day, I borrowed the dice and showed them the game just for a bit of fun. Apparently, Morgan then took the game and played it with other staff, who played it with other customers, and so on- each seeing how long it took the others to figure out the rule. When asked where it came from, Morgan just said “There’s this pastry chef named Matt who comes in and is a HUGE nerd, he showed it to me.”
So on a cloudy cold Sunday, I walked in to get a beer, and was greeted by a room of people all telling me how long it took them to figure out Petals Around the Rose (the fastest was & minutes, apparently) and Morgan gently scolded me saying “See, now you need to be more of a regular here. Everyone knows you.”
We can never tell just what it is about us that people will remember, and that’s a good thing. If we had to extrapolate every action of ours out Butterfly Effect-style, we’d go mad and paralyze ourselves into stagnation. We can’t walk around all day debating what every little thing we do will mean in a hundred years. All the same, to a lawyer in California, I’m the guy he used to drink with in Portland who came up with his favorite toast. To a cook, I was his first tattoo commission. To a brewery in Portland, I helped name one of their beers and introduced them to a new bar game. To an extent, our legacies and memories are in the hands of other people.
When you realize you never know what you’ll be remembered for, it makes you choose your activities wisely, treat others kindly, and live a more engaged and joyous life.
When someone cooks for you, the food can tell you where they came from, what’s important to them, what influenced them, and what they dream of being and doing. On one plate, everything from the ingredients to the cooking methods to the service style can give you a veritable masterclass in the entire culture the dish came from.
Then there’s people like me who try to write about all of that and what’s more, make a buck off of it. It takes no small amount of hubris to assume you can summarize a multimedia, multi-sensory experience to words on a page. Sometimes the only thing that encourages me in trying to do so is that 1. Someone has to, and 2. People have.
When your office is wherever you want it to be, things usually wind up delicious if a little unglamorous.
When I am in a sour mood- cranky, frustrated, exhausted, irritated by life- that’s often when I am most likely to do something charitable. I’ll help out a friend with a problem, give some extra cash to a panhandler, or buy something I don’t really need to support a good cause.
Why? There’s a lot of psychology behind the action. We can discuss the differences between empathy and sympathy, that being frustrated puts me in a more empathetic place to others and I’m more likely to try and help. We can discuss how doing good things releases endorphins, making me feel good, and whether or not that makes the action actually “altruistic.” It could even be as simple as “I feel like this world sucks, so I’m gonna do SOMETHING to make it better.”
Those would be excellent blog posts… but they are not this one. This post is about the fact that that same principle applies to when good things happen to other people, and to help your negative feelings about it. This post is about Impostor Syndrome, envy, and diffusing both by supporting your friends.
The worlds of food and classical music don’t always intersect- beyond the artistry and passion of their respective devotees, that is. When my wife (a piano teacher) and I discuss our work with each other, one of us is usually on “home turf.” I’m a professional baker and she loves to cook, or she’s expounding on an obscure piece of music and I know a couple big names. That’s marriage for you, though- we don’t “complete” each other, but we do find ways to be complete together.
In that sense, we often discuss ideas like discipline, teaching methods, leadership (in the context of our workplaces,) and the artistic aspects of what we’ve built our lives around.
And one thing that we agree on wholeheartedly is that talent doesn’t mean a damn thing.
The Black Hat Baker 