How Do You Get Out Of Your Own Way?
Photo of Mama’s cookbook and some of my favorites
I do a lot of thinking about writing.
What am I going to write, when am I going to write, what will someone think of my writing, what in the heck am I doing with my writing?
It’s exhausting, actually. The thinking in circles and trying to dig my way out of a rabbit’s hole of fear and insecurity. The uncertainty and confusion that play tag in my brain. The lack of discipline that bleeds dark into other areas of my life. The big why and what is this insatiable churning and yearning inside of me to do, to be, to accomplish, to be known, and heard.
I can’t seem to get out of my own way.
One Approach
So, when that happens, I usually, as we say in our family, “Take to the kitchen.” I have found little takes my mind off myself and my own insecurities more than following the handwritten instructions of a recipe. Now I do have a slew of cookbooks (here’s your shout out Martha, Ina, and Joanna, to name a few), but still I return time and again to the handwritten scribbles I hold as dear to my heart as the last lick of the spoon of poundcake batter.
I find that if I can do something with my hands, I can better explore what’s in my mind.
On one such occasion after I soothed myself with the sound of my KitchenAid Stand Mixer, I wrote this piece - it’s short, could be a start of my own cookbook, with family history woven in or some other tale about the truths of family (there I go again…).
Manuscript of Meals
I wanted to eat every page.
When I flipped through the small handwritten novella, I could smell my childhood: pot roast and butter beans, ice box cookies and Russian tea, potato latkes and blintze casserole, fruity charosis with tablespoons of Maneshevitz sweet wine. There was a chapter still sticky with the Karo syrup we used for Mrs. Crowley’s divinity and another sandpapered with the sugar and salt mixture of Grandma Ida’s roasted pecans.
At 8, on a wobbly stool repaired over and over in Pop’s basement workshop, I squatted, on skinned knees, and steadied myself for hours, watching her work in the heat of a Georgian summer, drunk on the liquor of a grandmother’s love.
It wasn’t what we ate, but how we ate. Taped inside the back cover of the beige coil-bound book was a printed page from the Atlanta Journal, illustrating an elaborate place setting and explaining the use of the oyster fork and the salt spoon. I never understood how that clipping became part of our family history book. We used napkins in rings and the good silver, but our meals were not formal. If we ate oysters, we slurped them out of the shell, and we shook our salt out of a shaker.
Southern. Jewish. Complicated. Unwritten chapter titles of the book that defined our family. Never shelved, always splayed open, accepting splashes of Crisco or spilled vanilla, the family cookbook edited itself like I learned to do.
A Suggestion