Warning: The post that follows is housecleaning, a complete and utter brain dump of a post, written mainly to shake some thoughts out of my head and to keep my writing muscles from turning vestigial. It contains no interesting tales of food, of life in New York or of vital issues of the day. It is solipsistic and probably irritating, and full of the things that blog haters hate about blogs, and bloggers. In short, it is really, really, really irritating, and if you’re not in the mood for irritation, you may want to give this post a pass, and wait for the funny stories about food, which will be here by the end of the week.
January 2006. I have just been to the market. I have a bag of apples in one hand, a bag of pears in the other. The hand that’s holding the bag of pears also holds my tote bag with my laptop, notecards, pencils and call slips for the Rare Book Room at the New York Public Library. It is the first time since before Christmas that I have been in the Rare Book Room, and I feel that little electrical charge in the soles of my feet, the one that says good things are on the way for this book in 2006, I just know it. I have the Oxford Symposium in September, I have offers from family and friends to take me to the National Agricultural Library at the USDA site in Beltsville, Maryland; to the ag school at Penn State; to the ag school at UC Berkeley; to Petaluma, California, once the Egg Basket to the World; to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard. I have received a nice email from the staff of the Dodd Center at the University of Connecticut, wishing me well and reminding me that summertime is an excellent time to come up and do research undisturbed. I am almost singing as I walk through the door and present my bags to the security guard. He looks in my purse, my tote bag and my bags of fruit, then waves me through. I take off my coat, put my laptop and notecards and cellphone into the plastic envelope in which I’ll need to keep them when I head up to the Rare Book Room. I also take out my library card and Rare Book Room pass.
As I put everything down on the counter, one of the two female coatcheckers on duty peers into the bag of apples. “What’s THIS?” she asks loudly, as if I’d just presented her with a bag of warm entrails.
“They’re just apples,” I answer.
“YOU can’t bring THOSE in here! WE can’t CHECK THIS! YOU can’t have THESE in here at ALL!”
I try to explain that I had shown the bag to the security guard and he hadn’t said anything about—god help me for this—forbidden fruit; that I am a regular visitor to the Rare Book Room, and that taking this stuff home meant losing at least an hour and a half of research time, including the window of opportunity for submitting the call slips for the book I want to review that day. I am met with repeated admonishments that I am NOT ALLOWED to EVEN HAVE food in here and they don’t CARE what I DO with it, but I am NOT keeping it in HERE, that there is NO FOOD ALLOWED IN THE LIBRARY. Even as I know it is a futile gesture to cop an attitude with these women, I put my coat back on, readjust my bags, and reply, snippily, “Well, obviously your security team is not aware of this rule, because the gentleman out front didn’t say a word to me. If he had, I would NOT have wasted your time.” They have already returned to their conversation with each other.
I do not return to the Rare Book Room again. It is only my intention to stay away for a few weeks, just until I can trust myself to go back to the Rare Book Room without making a scene, but a month later—a month in which I spend the weekends doing research using the books I’ve collected in my own home library over the past year—I wake up one Saturday morning and scratch my hand, badly, on a spring. Our mattress is lumpy and misshapen, badly in need of replacement, but we’ve been trying to put off the inevitable. I pull the sheets off the bed and find the offending spring protruding from the mattress. I look over at Lloyd’s side of the bed: it is a veritable minefield of exposed springs. The inevitable is here. I go to the bedding store, spend over $1,000 on a new mattress, and decide at that moment that I will not be going to the Oxford Symposium in September. I tell myself that my resolve—and my nerve—has not been weakened, but I am fooling myself. I have not done a lick of research since.
June 2006. Rhubarb and strawberries are in the market at the exact same time! Woohoo! With a full supply of jars at the ready, I run down to the greenmarket, pay for a flat of strawberries and ask if I can pick them up later, head up to Penn Station and pick up my mother, who is visiting for the day. I spend my weekend meticulously cutting up fruit, burying it in pounds of sugar, straining off the juice the next morning, cooking it down, adding the rhubarb, cooking it down, adding strawberries and lemon juice, decanting it into a 13-quart Cambro container, storing it in the fridge overnight, and then canning it off the next morning. It is exhausting work, and I think again how much easier this will be when I’m in a place where I have a stove big enough to hold multiple kettles and canners, as well as canners that can process more than 7 half-pints at a time. By the time the weekend is over, I have over 40 half-pints to show for my labors. I am exhausted but thrilled.
The next morning, still entrenched in the afterglow of a job well done, I get out my receipts and start doing the math. I had known that I would not make much money on this enterprise, especially since I am paying retail for my jars, and somewhere in the vicinity of retail for my produce, but I’d figured that the money I made would at least pay some bills, maybe make way for gentle expansion, like the purchase of a second canner or kettle. Nevertheless, the truth is much more harsh than I thought it would be: my cost is 55% of my sell price. I will have to sell 23 jars of jam just to break even. As I recheck the numbers, I realize that this doesn’t even include the cost of handling, of packing supplies and labels. I think about the hours I spent sterilizing jars, writing insert copy, hand-writing labels, packing everything and carrying it all to the post office. I have been working my tail off for pin money. If I’m to do any better, I’m going to need a production facility, dry storage, proper shipping software. I walk around my neighborhood, asking as many local restaurants and delis as I can, including places where I’ve been a customer for over 10 years, if I can rent their kitchen space after hours. No one is willing to rent to me, due to liability issues.
“You don’t get rich making jam,” one of my best friends gently reminds me as I weep on his shirt (theoretically, as he lives on the other side of the country). “It’s the sort of thing you do because you love to do it.” He’s right, but already I can feel my resolve crumbling. I think about Ann Cooper’s book of interviews with women chefs, A Woman’s Place is in the Kitchen; the chefs all come from varying backgrounds and work at an eclectic mix of restaurants, but one issue remains constant, and resonant: You have to want it, badly. You have to want it when the odds are stacked against you. You have to want it to the point where you are obsessed about it. If you don’t want it badly enough, it’s not for you. I don’t even know how badly I want it anymore.
July 2006. Our neighborhood loses power for over a week. Among the lost food in our refrigerator are the two sourdough starters I cultured at my professional breadbaking classes at King Arthur Flour in Vermont in 2002. Those were going to be the seed starters for my bakery in Pittsburgh. I remind myself that the reason I became an egg researcher was that I had applied for the Egg Board Fellowship at the Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow to distract myself from the realization that I couldn’t raise enough financing to open the bakery, and that, in fact, it had been a long, long time since I had worked on the business plan with any real regularity. Nevertheless, I have to blink back tears as I throw the starters away.
August 2006. After weeks of scrambling, reorganizing and helping to train the temp who will be covering for me, I begin what will be four weeks of grand jury duty in State Supreme Court. The first two days are agonizing; I’m sure that something is going to happen while I’m out, something that I missed that will end up exploding all over my poor hapless friends at LuthorCorp, something that will cost me my job. After the first two days, though, I gradually realize, a la Ralphie in A Christmas Story, that I am not about to be killed. That noted, I begin to relax a little bit, and I realize that I find the rhythm of jury duty kind of soothing. There is a lot of downtime, enough to make me glad that I remembered to pack a good book and something to knit, but the uptime, when the lawyers and the court reporters arrive, that’s when it gets interesting. There is a lot of grumbling about how boring all this is, but none of it is coming from me. Sometimes we get whole cases presented to us, from the introduction to the charge-and-vote, but usually we get cases that are to be continued at a later date. During one case, a case that will eventually lead to spirited debate during deliberations, the juror sitting to my right says, “Oh, this is so frustrating. I don’t like getting all these little cookie cases.”
“Cookie cases?” I ask.
“Yeah. They give us this information like it’s a cookie, and then they snatch it back away from you before you’re done. I want the whole cookie.”
I like this juror a lot; we have great conversations, and her analogy makes me laugh, but even through my amusement I find myself getting a little impatient: This isn’t Law and Order. I think about the previous night, when Lloyd and I were watching Cartoon Network and we saw an ad for bottled water, specifically marketed to children. “Now water can be fun!,” says the voiceover, and Lloyd turns to me, his fists clenched at his sides in the way that signals to me that a Really Good Media Rant is on the way. “You know what’s going to ruin this country? This whole mandate for everything to be fun. Breakfast has to be fun. School has to be fun. Reading has to be fun. Now even water has to be fun?” Something clicks inside my head: This isn’t what I would call fun, but I like it anyway.
As the weeks go by, I learn that most of the assistant d.a. positions in Queens County are filled by entry-level lawyers. During a particularly tedious round of cases of a type where we hear basically the same information over and over again, as some of the other jurors roll their eyes, I think about these lawyers, and how hard they work, how carefully they have to establish facts for the record. I also think about the public defenders that some of these defendants may one day face, how hard they work to find any gaps, any weaknesses, in the state’s case; all of these young lawyers work like dogs, for relatively little money. I wonder about the feasibility of coming back after the term is up, once I’m no longer a grand juror, and taking a couple of a.d.a.’s to lunch and picking their brains: Why did you choose the Queens D.A.’s office? Where did you go to law school? Are the thankless moments of the job offset by the knowledge that you are working for the public good?
What are you doing? says my conscience. You’re not a lawyer, you’re a baker! How many times have you ever heard anyone say that their town needs more district attorneys? No! They all say they need bakers! You worked on that business plan for three solid years! You’re only thinking about law school because you’re miserable at LuthorCorp, but you’re afraid to do what it takes to open that bakery, or to expand Bakerina Kitchens, or to write your book. And you’re panicking about your best blogging years being behind you. You are behaving like a dilettante—no, you’re behaving like Hamlet. You never get anything done because you can’t make up your damn mind.
I pop a Tylenol PM, fall into a fretful sleep, and wake up the next morning realizing that I have basically memorized the definitions of “legally sufficient evidence” and “reasonable cause to believe.”
“You’d be good at it,” says one of my friends who is a lawyer. “But I also think you have what it takes to be a terrific baker.” We discuss the feasibility of combining the two: Le Pain d’Avocat. I am not thoroughly convinced on the feasibility, but it does make me smile.
September 13, 2006. I once said that I felt as if I were walking around with a question mark over my head, like a character in The Sims. I am feeling that tonight, dear friends, in spades.