If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.’
– Ben Franklin
You don’t get to decide whether or not you are a mentor. Your apprentices decide that when they determine whether or not they can learn from you- and the absolute greatest feeling on Earth is when your apprentices succeed.
“The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.”
– Marcel Proust
All you can do some days is keep going.
I come into the kitchen and assess the production list for the day, keenly aware of my struggles to lose weight again.
Next comes reviewing the banquets for the day and make sure I block out time to individually decorate and tray the desserts people paid for, knowing that people I called friends are agitating for my death (intentionally or not) because I’m a Jew.
I build out the list, grab ingredients, and start mixing the day’s breads, fully conscious that my government is a joke and that folks like me are continually convinced to focus their ire on each other than the higher-ups with every reason to keeps us all angry and hateful all the time.
I make my silly little pastries, bake my silly little breads, and carry on like none of it is disappointing and hurtful and frustrating and sad. I do it because I know someone out there IS disappointed, hurt, frustrated, and sad, and what I make can be the One Good Thing that they get to enjoy today.
I can grieve. I can rage and piss and moan and cry… but not when I’m baking. There’s someone else’s day at stake then, and it’s not mine to ruin.
“A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
I knew that a lot had changed at my old culinary school before I turned off the Black Horse Pike in Mays Landing into the campus. There were better and brighter signs on the road to the parking lots, for starters. I peeked down drives slowly, trying to remember which lots were for students and faculty and which ones a visitor would go unnoticed in.
The larger one in the back of the campus- now shaded by sun covers that doubled as solar energy panels- fit the bill and it was right near the main entrance that I rarely used as a student. Students always went in a side door near a smaller lot, closer to the majority of the classrooms and kitchens. Not that too many young culinarians still used it. Class sizes apparently plummeted due to COVID and the Culinary Industry Brain Drain. Even coming from a community college, culinary school wasn’t a winning proposition for young people tight on money and prospects. It was a place now for two kinds of students- the passionate, and the lost.
Fortunately, those are exactly the kinds of folks that have kept the industry moving for years. I walked up the wide, low concrete steps and pushed open the door. Rather than noise from busy kitchens and clamoring students in pressed white uniforms, I’m greeted by silence- and the mingled smells of butter, hot fat, flour, bread ovens, and cold vegetables. I can never forget that smell. Some things haven’t changed at all.
“Welcome back, Matt.”
Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona Multi: sed omnes illacrimabiles Urgentur, ignotique longa Nocte, carent quia vate sacro.
– Horace
(“Many heroes lived before Agamemnon, but they are all unmourned, and consigned to oblivion, because they had not their sacred bard.”)
I first read that quote on a webpage of Latin mottos where it was offered as just the first statement- “Vixere fortes ante agamemnona”- to mean that heroism exists even if no one notices it. Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, this is a perfect demonstration of the power of the pen. The quote itself extols the role of writers and poets in giving heroes immortality.
The metacontext of the quote is that when Horace wrote the passage in his Odes, he was simping for the original “sacred bard” Homer, author of the Iliad where Agamemnon’s story is recounted. Some translators have taken a little poetic license on this and interpret the passage (the way I first heard it) as “Brave men lived before Agamemon, but they died forgotten, for there were no poets before Homer.”
The meta-metacontext is that, if you read the Iliad at all, Agamemnon is pretty much an absolute knob, a coward, a monster, and absolutely responsible for all of his own failures including and especially his own death. So millennia of writers and poets have been needed to burnish his story into anything remotely resembling a hero.
That’s what we in the creative business call “serious workshopping.”
I got myself a really nice writing chair for sitting at my desk some time ago. I also have some wonderful USB-powered hand warmers that look like little stuffed toasts I got from a friend. My older sister sent me a USB-powered mug with a warming function and a freaking app to set the temperature for keeping beverages warm, a timer for tea, and to control what color the little light glows when its on.
With Portland in the grip of the Artic Blast (which no one will be able to say without making me think of a minty gum flavor,) the internet has been down and the blogging software on my computer is picky about working without the internet.
My iPad is not, though- and my iPad is here next to me in my rocking chair with a Mexican blanket and a mug of deep, dark, local beer. I may return to my Super Professional Writing Space for some editing and tweaks, but for now? Hygge wins.
The Black Hat Baker 