I loved that Bodhi and I wish I'd been able to spend more time with him. I have a whole bunch of half-written noodling scenes that were going to be him learning to cook and always wound up being other things. It would be such a fascinating fic, and yet, it would be so much research and probably would wind up being for a very small audience.
Maybe I could file the serial numbers off and start over and just write a meditative little m/m romance about a lost disavowed depressed Desi self-exile in central New York trying to teach himself to cook his half-remembered mother's food from what he can get at the Price Chopper and finding unlikely love in the process, but I'd really have to start over. I was just remembering that fic, though, as winter settles down heavily on us here-- there was a bit where another delivery driver had left his van idling to warm up and Bodhi got yelled at for it, and I thought of that the other, snowy morning as I walked past people's driveways with their cars idling in them to warm up, either too long, wastefully, or not long enough and they're out there with their ice scrapers and grim faces.
I loved reading this post, by the way. I have a whole other comment I was going to write, that I've been pondering a long time, about what it must be like to be-- in a place, like, currently and ancestrally, and I don't know how to talk about it at all. My ancestors have been in this area since 1620, only, and I have no direct connections to anywhere else, and all we have is this weirdly aggressively-homogenized New National Identity. I have the problem that I won't eat at Italian restaurants because that's home food why pay so much for it, but I'm not Italian in any way (and that's goofy, Italian food in restaurants here is amazing). I don't know what my ancestors ate. I genuinely don't think chicken needs much seasoning. I'm a disaster. My mother wasn't taught to cook as a young girl. She learned after she married, from a cookbook. Some of what she makes is the way she remembers her grandmother cooking it, but it's only her approximation. Her mother cooked only from boxed mixes and cans because it was The New Way. We have no direct tradition, just the outlines of traditions that are remembered. Anyway-- I don't have a coherent way of talking about it. I'm so fascinated by people that do have-- I guess identities, and the focus on the culinary is so interesting because it's so deep-seated and visceral and universal. tl;dr I would read more about this every goddamn day, lol.
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Maybe I could file the serial numbers off and start over and just write a meditative little m/m romance about a lost disavowed depressed Desi self-exile in central New York trying to teach himself to cook his half-remembered mother's food from what he can get at the Price Chopper and finding unlikely love in the process, but I'd really have to start over. I was just remembering that fic, though, as winter settles down heavily on us here-- there was a bit where another delivery driver had left his van idling to warm up and Bodhi got yelled at for it, and I thought of that the other, snowy morning as I walked past people's driveways with their cars idling in them to warm up, either too long, wastefully, or not long enough and they're out there with their ice scrapers and grim faces.
I loved reading this post, by the way. I have a whole other comment I was going to write, that I've been pondering a long time, about what it must be like to be-- in a place, like, currently and ancestrally, and I don't know how to talk about it at all. My ancestors have been in this area since 1620, only, and I have no direct connections to anywhere else, and all we have is this weirdly aggressively-homogenized New National Identity. I have the problem that I won't eat at Italian restaurants because that's home food why pay so much for it, but I'm not Italian in any way (and that's goofy, Italian food in restaurants here is amazing). I don't know what my ancestors ate. I genuinely don't think chicken needs much seasoning. I'm a disaster.
My mother wasn't taught to cook as a young girl. She learned after she married, from a cookbook. Some of what she makes is the way she remembers her grandmother cooking it, but it's only her approximation. Her mother cooked only from boxed mixes and cans because it was The New Way. We have no direct tradition, just the outlines of traditions that are remembered.
Anyway-- I don't have a coherent way of talking about it. I'm so fascinated by people that do have-- I guess identities, and the focus on the culinary is so interesting because it's so deep-seated and visceral and universal.
tl;dr I would read more about this every goddamn day, lol.