Writing a blog is harder than it seems. I get all these great ideas and they all go away when I sit down to write. I try to think of myself as a technophile, but I want a pen and paper to write down my ideas. Why is that best ideas come when you have neither a phone nor a pen and paper to write anything down?
I have been brooding on my own mortality lately. I’m not particularly old, but the end of this journey is probably closer than the start. All this has not been helped by the process of starting to move and go through all the stuff that accumulates. It is hard for me to get rid of things. I am a pack rat by nature and keep all sorts of good things, hoping that someday I will find a use for all those half used notebooks and 400 various sized nails or screws in my “junk box”. We give away and donate and throw away and there seems to be no end. How can two people have so much stuff?
I am going through my mother-in-law’s cookbooks. There are some really neat things there. I found a recipe from a paper in the 1930’s, several from the 40’s. I found a story about the first road sensors being installed in Cincinnati for traffic control. It was from the August 24, 1943 issue of the Cincinnati Post. I read an Emily Post article from 1950 about the proper etiquette for a double wedding. The most interesting article I found was about a couple wanting to get a divorce after 2300 years of marriage (Cincinnati Post, Sept. 23, 1943). Kids these days.
I am from the South, so most recipes I know start out with either: Pour a can of condensed soup or Use 1 box of cake mix or add 1 giant jar of Marshmallow creme. All these recipes that my mother-in-law kept have none of that. They almost all have simple ingredients that are easy to find and have no preprocessed stuff in them. Most are desserts, but why keep recipes for anything else? Julia Child said that desserts are the secret to life (I’m paraphrasing a little here, artistic license and all).
My point, if I have one, is that we should all leave a legacy of desserts rather than a box of mismatched hardware. Our kids will make and eat the desserts, they will remember when we shared them after some family occasion. They, however, are ones who will have to go through the mixed box of our leftovers, most of which they will toss. They throw away the tangible and treasure the remembered.
I have to go now. Some store in Lauderdale Lakes has Oreos for 69 cents.
The Purposeful Geek 