Lonely dinner table

A dinner table was meant to be shared. The culture that invented it must've been one whose skins bore the deep furrows that loneliness surely left on them after centuries of soul wrenching battles. At the end there prevailed this conviction that if the human being is not meant to be alone, there is no other moment in which loneliness blows its icy breath the coldest than at meal times. Having bread alone is like loving... alone, with no one to share it.

Although this blog is supposed to revolve around food, it does not do that every time. One reason is that blogging amounts to setting the table at dinner time when one is utterly alone. This is so because writing is a solitary excercise. Greek-French cartoonist and writer Vassilis Alexakis so describes it in his Je t'oublirierai tous les jours:

"En ajoutant un mot aprés l'autre, je construisais un mur invisible autour de moi, je protégeais ma solitude."

However, coming to the table of this blog is not a quest for loneliness. It's an evidence of its cold presence all around.

Enjoy your summer... and strawberries!!

A token of wisdom, from S. A. Lane (Lunenburg, Nova Scotia), on a letter to MacLean's Magazine (July 2009):

"The method for success is to freeze the berries whole, with stems on, in a single layer on cookie sheets overnight. The following day they can be placed in freezer bags, and thawed when ready to use. They taste like fresh berries and are a real treat in the middle of the winter."

There's some hope for us, mindless cicadas, but let's tone our merrymaking down a bit and roll up our sleeves this summer next to these clever and hard working ants.

Father's Day

Hi guys:

Today is Father's Day around here. A columnist, writing for The Globe and Mail, used the other day the same expression that one of you mentioned last Sunday: that Father's Day is a Hallmark Day. The same can be said of almost everything: Mother's Day, Earth Day, Christmas, etc.

Since Hallmark doesn't produce cards for dads to address his kids on Father's Day, and taking advantage that very few men do that (I wonder if any does it), I thought that I'd write to both of you on this day.

Let me follow the path of emotions in order to describe what does it mean to be a dad. As soon as I got the confirmation that you guys were on your way, my first emotion was fear. This is a very complex emotion, because it's one of the very few that is shaped by its object, by what provokes it. Fear to the unknown is different to the fear that stems from being threatened, and its' quite different from the fear that is stirred up by the ugly and horrible, or by what is different and new.

In hindsight I'd say that Dr. Ventolini's announcement confronted me with the challenges of being a man. Thus, I discovered that fear doesn't necessarily have to lead to paralysis. In my case, fear prompted me to act as a man, that is to embrace the joy of sharing life with what is at the end the fruits of love. It's a brave thing, this business of raising children. It's so brave that one is always left with a nagging feeling of inadequacy.

Now, 22 and 20 years later I want to say that I'm glad that I was invaded by fear when you guys were born. Years later, I read in a poem that we come to this world to face our own demons: "What I do is me: for that I came". Busying myself with becoming me took me through the dark valley of fear, and if there's any success for me to claim it's because of you. Bursting through life, you spurred me on to conquer my fears, at least the scariest of them all: that of becoming a man.

Fearful? Yes. Dithering? No. This is what I am: a man with his fears, yet unwilling to surrender it all to its cold cuffs. Fear was displaced by love, cheesy as it may sound. The old book says that wherever there's love there's no room for fear.

I congratulate myself on this day because of you guys. Each one of you, each on his own way, is figthing the good battle, that which will see you gaining solid ground for you to firmly stand on. Let the ensuing scars render you truthful and sensitive to the beauty of the human mistery.

I love you both; dearly.

Dad

Unidad Cristiana Universitaria - 40 años