Animals Don’t Throw Parties

When my wife and I got married, I knew she didn’t know how to cook.  She told me she could boil eggs, but that was about it.  I didn’t really give it much thought.  I was not focused on her cooking.  I was young and inexperienced in the realities of life.  We both decided that I would help her learn since I knew how to cook.  Well, I knew how to cook a few more things than boiled eggs.  I could make omelets and spaghetti, for example, your basic bachelor survival menu.

One morning in the first week of our brand new marriage, she asked if I wanted some scrambled eggs (actually, I thought it was the very first morning of our marriage, but I have learned not to argue with my wife’s memory because it is usually better).  She managed to crack the eggs and get them into the frying pan, but then I noticed she was just standing by the stove, spoon in hand, and watching them cook.  They were quickly becoming one large, flat, sunny side everywhere pancake.  I quickly took the spoon and began stirring the eggs as I said something like, “You have to keep stirring them to make them scramble.”  There was no answer.  I looked around at an empty kitchen.  In an instant she had completely disappeared.  Clearly, she had talents I hadn’t counted on.

I called out, but there was no answer.  I climbed the stairs of the old farm house we had rented and found her propped up in bed calmly reading a book.  I asked her, in my nicest tone, what she was doing.  “Reading” was the calm reply.  I should have seen that coming but, remember, I was newly-married.  I was not prepared for our first tiff.  In fact, I had never even considered that this sort of thing would occur in our marriage.  I was on a steep learning curve, and it was definitely up hill.

I tried again.  “Why did you leave?”  Her answer was still in that very calm voice that I was coming to realize spoke volumes.  “If you want to cook, you can cook.”

In my defense, I remind you that she had asked me to help her with the cooking.  In hindsight, I hope I had enough sense not to point that out to her, but I probably did.  I was still green as grass.  I have since come to understand that husbands understand certain phrases in quite different ways than wives understand them.  Obviously, helping her learn to cook did not mean what I thought it had meant.

I learned the lesson well.  I never offered help in the kitchen again, unless it was a simple “Anything I can do to help?”  As long as she was directing, everything was fine.  I have come to realize that for some women a kitchen is like the bridge on a ship, and it is clear who the captain of the bridge is.

Lest you think my wife is some kind of ogre, I hasten to add that she is all I’d hoped she would be.  I couldn’t have found a better wife for me and mother for our children.  As a bonus, she became a fantastic cook.  We did have some interesting meals on the road to greatness, like the salt soup.  It started out as lintel soup, I believe, but one could only taste salt.  I said nothing.  I left it up to her to bring it up, which she did.  “This soup is a bit salty,” she said, or something like that.

She dumped our servings out and doubled the recipe, without the salt.  It was still inedible, but it wasn’t me that pointed it out.  She ended up dumping it all out.  I said nothing.  I can’t remember what we ate, but I know I ate it as if it had been the planned entree.

That was a long time ago.  Somehow, over the years, she managed to become an excellent cook — without my help.  Our children grew up thinking all mothers came equipped as four star chefs.  For them, eating was always a pleasure.  Everyday meals were delicious.  Special occasions, like Christmas, Easter, or Thanksgiving — well, feasts best describes them.

She can spend two or three days, or more counting dessert, preparing these special dinners.  It takes her that long because, not only does she prepare a feast of food, she prepares the whole house.  She truly makes these special meals celebrations of life.  I am truly a blessed man considering I wasn’t even thinking about food when I proposed to her, and she turns out to be a gift in one of the most crucial aspects of life — food.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  Well, yes I do.  I was stunned by her obvious charms, cooking not being one of them.  Only later did I come to realize how important eating is to human beings.

I don’t just mean food is important, which it obviously is.  Rather, I am struck by all the love, care, and hard work that have gone into the thousands of meals she has prepared over the years.  Somehow love is communicated, or can be communicated, through food, its preparation, and the enjoying of it.  The simple act of eating together can build community through the communication of love.  How clever God is to make something so necessary so he could build into it a means of our growth in charity.

How we eat that food, then, is very important.  To simply eat to survive is not much fun.  It is just as important to enjoy meals as social occasions.  I am often struck by how important a role food plays in human existence.  When a couple weds, the wedding meal is almost as central as the wedding itself.  This is one of the big errors in eloping — no meal with family and friends.

I can recall when a young woman I knew was planning her wedding.  She came from a very strong ethnic community, and she was upset because all her mother’s friends wanted to bring food to the wedding banquet.  She wanted a beautifully catered affair, which is what she got in the end.  I thought that was very sad — sad for her and for her mother’s friends.  I now know how important it was for them to contribute to the occasion.  Food is more than sustenance for the body.  This is a lesson my wife taught me.  Our special meals became more and more festive as the years passed and as her talents grew.  She knew how to feed us in every way.

This brings me to my main point, in case you’ve been wondering.  Why is it humans have feasts or parties and animals don’t? It’s not just because they can’t hang bunting and party balloons.  Monkeys are very similar to us, but they don’t throw feasts, as far as I know.  They act toward food much as I did in my bachelor days.  I tried to make my meals as efficient as I could.  I was quite pleased with myself when I could cook and eat my whole meal out of one pot.  You guys, except the ones who actually roast garlic and such, know what I mean.  You were there once.  It’s the primitive urge to cook simply over the hunting fire.  Bachelors are willing to admit fire is a good thing, but we don’t want to take it too far.

Yes, we do.  My wife taught me that.  That’s one reason we men need wives, so we will learn that there is more to life than efficiency.  Besides weddings, every major and millions of minor human milestones are recorded in the collective memory of family and friends with the aid of food.  This is why in most of our photos of special occasions we are seated around a table.  This is true for every culture I’ve ever heard of.  Would people travel and not want to eat the food of the country they were visiting?  Food has to be at least half the reason for travelling.  I would rather eat in Italy than look at fountains.  I can’t think of any area in which humans have been more creative than in preparing and eating food.  If I were a publisher who wanted to make money, I would publish cookbooks.  They always sell.  There are never too many cookbooks.  If there were such a thing, we would have stopped publishing them years ago.

Efficiency is the key word here.  Too much of our modern life is dictated by this dangerous word.  Food, at least the preparing and eating of it, may just be a last-stand against this prevailing trend toward boredom.  Now, efficiency in its place is fine, but its place is not at the dinner table and certainly not at feasts and parties.  Feasts and parties are inefficient for a reason.  The reason is that humans are not animals, or not only animals.  We are a special form of animal, an animal with a spiritual soul.  We live in two realms, the material one and the supernatural one.  This is a difficult job.  We can’t ignore either aspect of our existence without doing harm to ourselves materially or spiritually.

To be truly efficient, we need to take both the material and the supernatural into consideration.  What is considered efficient in the material may not be very efficient in the spiritual.  Take eating, again, as an example.  It might not be considered efficient for my wife to spend two or three days preparing an Easter dinner that my family will eat in less than half an hour.  But that doesn’t deter her.  She happily does it year after year.  There is something in her human nature that finds it, not efficient, but necessary.  Her meals feed not only our bodies but our souls as well.  When we consider ourselves as we truly are, a material-spiritual being, we have to consider efficiency in a completely different way.

We are made in the image of God, that’s why we are spirits.  When we forget God we forget who we truly are, and our world tends to become more efficient in the wrong way.  We stop feeding our souls, even with the gifts given to us by God in the material world.  We don’t take the time to do the things that can feed more than just our bodies.  Celebrations and food, thanks be to God, seem to resist this trend more than most things.

When people tell me there is no such thing as God or the spiritual, I remind them of birthday parties. I figure birthday parties are a solid argument for the spiritual.  If we were only material beings we wouldn’t bother with birthday parties.  They are too inefficient.  Waste of time.  Look at the animals.  When was the last time you saw a cocker spaniel throw a party?

The best times of our lives, the times we get the most joy in life, are not usually when we are being efficient in that limited, material sense.  So, let’s have longer meals, more celebrations, and take the time to pet our animal friends who don’t throw parties.