Talking with Kids - Part 2
This is the second of a two part series about chats I had with groups of 10th grade kids here in Tartu. Here is the link to part 1
Angelo Pellegrini is one of my favorite food writers. It is not because Angelo gave me great recipes. In fact his book, The Unprejudiced Palate offers very fiew. Instead, Angelo argues that if you have the right orientation, cooking becomes “a routine household duty, no more difficult to perform with distinction than keeping the home tidy and attractive …”
To get that orientation, Angelo first asks ”What is the purpose of life?” His answer: “Work is the purpose of life.” Put another way, life’s meaning is found in doing things well. There is a craft to living well, and in his writing, Angelo goes into great detail about this craftsmanship. I love it. Angelo taught me that we each can find the good life (success) without a huge amount of fuss and bother. And better yet, we can share our ideas as we go, building communities based on shared learning. This is pretty heady stuff.
I was thinking about Angelo as the first group of kids started sitting down around the table. When they were ready, I asked them if they thought they were successful. Not surprisingly, they weren’t sure how to answer. I threw in that the answer depends on what we mean by “success”. This opened a door, and a few ideas started to flow about what success is. “But what if we could learn some habits that make that success easy?” I asked. It was like a bomb hit the table. Life could be easy? What a radical idea! And then we started to talk about how we listen, how we talk, and how we learn from our experiences. That was fun.
In the end, I didn’t offer any complex recipes or deep insights. We just chatted about how we think and talk. Damn! Those kids were pretty smart. And they were fun to talk with.
FOLLOW - Just for fun, here is the opening from M.F.K. Fisher’s Afterword to “An Unprejudiced Palate”. Fisher was a master of the craft of using surprise in story telling. Enjoy!
Although I have known very few men of letters intimately, excluding my husband, of course, Angelo Pellegrini is the only one I have ever shared a spit-bucket with.
Perhaps the nearest I ever came to this was one noontime in a heat spell in New York, in about 1944, when I waited a long time for Somerset Maugham to get up from his luncheon rendez-vous with a handsome blonde and then sat as soon as possible in his char. It was warmer than the weather, almost hot from his plump old bottom, and I felt it voluptuously through my whole being, like fine tea or perhaps a noble Chambertin sat upon and in, rather than drunk as common mortals would absorb it.
And sharing a bucket at the Pomona County fair grounds with Angelo Pellegrini, in about 1946, was even headier … or perhaps I should say soul-shaking. He detested me.