Not home for the holidays

So I cooked the bird, and it came out fine. What's more, I had somewhere in my childhood encountered an interesting stuffing that involved nuts and dried apricots, and I managed to reconstruct a decent simulacrum simply by checking out other recipes along the same lines and intuiting what I might do to arrive at a similar outcome.

It was an amazing experience. I learned from it that the preparing of food could be a sensory experience (slathering that turkey skin with butter!), that shopping for ingredients, particularly in the terrific ethnic markets of Toronto, was fun, and akin to assembling tubes of paint for a painting. I learned that cooking food could be a sensual experience (the smells and sounds of sautéeing butter and almonds), that making a meal for folks you liked and cared about was a way of expressing pleasure in their company and winning their affections. I learned that sharing a meal was a way for peers and co-equals to enjoy one another.

I learned that figuring out how to make the imaginative leap from food you thought about eating to food you actually cooked involved a kind of artistic fulfillment -- a way to make manifest something you previously carried around solely in your head.

I had been the sort of girl nerd who scored high on objective tests but could never figure out how to put on makeup or do my hair or sew. But it turned out I could cook. I had at last found an outlet for my physical nature that didn't involve swimming, horses or necessarily, in any direct sense, boys.

I remained a spaz, though -- there was no crossover from one kind of dexterity to another. I have never cast off the entirely inadvertent slapstick physical comedy routines. People who meet me to this day are surprised that I can cook --- for I still can't draw a straight line with a ruler, can't fold a towel so it has right angles, can't parallel park when I'm tired.

Now, almost 30 years later, if I were to re-create that Thanksgiving dinner in San Francisco, I am sure it would taste far better than what I cooked up in the communal kitchen on the 19th floor of that International Style building in downtown Toronto.

I could use a free-range turkey -- humanely raised and organically fed in the Sierra foothills. I might be able to purchase biodynamically farmed apricots imported (perhaps) from the foothills of the Himalayas under fair-trade practices, or almonds from heirloom varietals grown only in certain orchards on select hectares in the Sacramento Valley. The bread crumbs would probably come from an artisan bakery that routinely carries four kinds of baguettes, the butter from happy cows living on family farms in West Marin, cows whose existence not only helps preserve the Bay Area's greenbelt but provides a healthy livelihood for people in recovery.

But as we all know, there's a special sweetness to the first time, particularly when it works out so well. And that Thanksgiving remains the only one, perhaps, where I truly gave thanks, and knew what I was thankful for.

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