“Wow, that smells good!” said the young man at my door. He was selling books and became distracted from his spiel when the scent of the black-bean chili I’d been stirring wafted outside. I asked him to come back later so I could think about the books.
After an hour the young man returned with a friend. He explained that their bus was late to pick them up, and he asked if they could have some chili. My husband pulled extra chairs up to the table, and we enjoyed dinner with our new friends.
After the men left, I told my husband, “This is one of the first times since Burundi that I’ve truly felt at home.”
As a child I lived with my parents in the mountains of Burundi. If travelers ventured into our rural area and didn’t reach their destination by dark, our home was one of the few places they could stop for the night. Dad would butcher a chicken, a rabbit, or a goat, depending on the size of the group, and the hired cook and my mother would prepare the meal. Conversation around the table might be in Kirundi, French, Swahili, or English. The adults would discuss the refugee crisis or which roads were passable after the recent flood. Then my parents and our household help would make up beds for our guests.
Growing up in Burundi, I believed that life was about welcoming strangers. Imagine my shock when we arrived in Michigan and I discovered that not everyone in the world lives that way. I wondered where all the guests had gone.
I hope my kitchen can be like the Eucharist table, where “we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.”
Beth Kilpatrick
Hewitt, Texas
My uncle P. had a big personality and a loud, cackling laugh. He frightened me as a child, and I often stepped behind my mother when he walked into a room. He’d spot me and call out, “Look at that monkey!” I’d burst into tears, and he’d laugh. He seemed to have a special gift for getting a reaction out of people.
When I was a teenager, he was diagnosed with cancer and given six months to live. After clinical trials bought him more time, he stopped his teasing, and a gentler side of him started to emerge. He’d call just to say he loved me. Around the hospital he became known for his unshakable positive attitude: coaching other patients through their treatments; offering “free hugs” to those who looked devastated; comforting families. With each borrowed year, a deeper sensitivity grew.
A couple of years ago, at a family reunion, I introduced him to my daughter. She was wearing an orange shirt, which happens to be the team color of the Texas Longhorns, the rival of Uncle P.’s beloved Aggies. “Where’d you get that ugly shirt?” he asked her.
She didn’t notice the twinkle in his eye and started crying. In a flash I told her, “You’ve got to dish it right back to him.”
She turned on him and said, “If you don’t like orange, then why is your bald head glowing orange?”
He looked shocked, then burst out laughing. “Oh, I like her!” he exclaimed.
I realized then that I, too, had missed the twinkle in his eye when I was a child.
Uncle P. died recently, twenty-five years after his diagnosis. His funeral was packed with people telling stories about his kindness and encouragement. I’ve never met anyone else with his blend of profound compassion for others and great joy at pushing their buttons.
M.R.
Houston, Texas
I’ve always been a distracted cook. I’ve burned countless meals —pancakes, sautéed vegetables, even rice—because I stepped out of the kitchen to fold laundry or water the plants. I don’t have the patience to set a timer either.
One night I emptied a box of pasta into a pot of cold water over a burner I’d just turned to high. My boyfriend cringed. “You didn’t even wait for the water to boil,” he chided me. “And you have to stir the pasta.” He spoke to me like I was a child, which made me feel ashamed and angry. I knew I was supposed to boil the water first and stir, but arguing seemed pointless, so I held my tongue.
He and I broke up a year ago, and I still have bitter feelings toward him. He was belittling and often mean. I’ll even dump pasta into cold water just to spite him. Sometimes the burnt, mushy pasta makes me feel vindicated. Other times it just reminds me that I’m single, eating terrible pasta alone on my couch.
I’ve been trying to spend more time with friends. The other day I cooked for my friend Kendall. I made sure the water was boiling before I added the pasta, and Kendall and I talked while I stirred the bow ties until they were perfectly al dente. We had a lovely meal together. My ex was right—it is better this way.
H.G.
Indianapolis, Indiana
I loved my father-in-law, Charlie, but the negative way he often spoke to my husband, Bill, had always bothered me. His gruff tone conveyed disappointment and criticism, and he seemed either unaware of the effect it had on Bill or unwilling to change.
At my husband’s family’s reunion, folks gathered in groups, catching up before the big potluck meal. Charlie was talking to a few other old men, and I heard him say something complimentary about Bill.
When I got a moment alone with Charlie, I smiled and said, in what I hoped was a light tone, “I heard the nice things you were telling the guys about Bill. I wish you would tell him.”
Charlie was taken aback.
“I think lunch is ready,” I said, and I hooked my arm through his. “Shall we find a seat?”
I like to believe I planted a seed that day. From then on, until Charlie died nine years later, he was noticeably kinder and more appreciative toward his son, and they grew closer than they had ever been.
Kate Bird
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada
I spent a month in an ashram in northern India in 1989. During that time the ashram held a spiritual gathering that attracted thousands of devotees. Everyone was served three meals a day. Small metal plates full of delicious food were passed down a long line of volunteers to the masses, and a parallel line returned empty plates to the kitchen to be washed. Over the course of the event I saw a three-story-high pile of straw slowly disappear as it was burned to heat the cooking cauldrons.
The devotees were not charged for food, nor was I ever asked to pay for my meals or my room in the dorm. When I asked the ashram’s teacher how the community survived, he just laughed and said, “Westerners don’t understand the concept of giving.”
I found a way to contribute: The head of the kitchen had back trouble, and, as a chiropractor, I offered to help him. The first time I entered the kitchen, I was amazed to find only five workers managing the whole process. The women tending the huge pots were chatting and laughing in a relaxed manner. How did everyone stay so calm with all that responsibility?
Every time I arrived to treat my patient, I told him I could come back later if he was too busy. He would laugh and say, “Brother, everything is fine. Have a seat. Would you like some tea?”
Ever since then, when stressful things occur, I think back to the ashram’s kitchen and try to let my tension dissipate like the shrinking pile of straw.
Harvey Schwartz
Bellingham, Washington
I’ve worked at both chain and independent restaurants and was a manager for several years, so I can confirm what they say about cooks: We’re scumbags. At the restaurant I managed, all of us had been to jail or prison. All of us were substance abusers—cocaine, heroin, pills, marijuana, and alcohol, imbibed on the clock as well as off. Despite being in charge, I still snorted heroin with another cook, drank the cheap liquor we hid in the freezer, and made funny faces out of food on my cutting board, my tomato eyes and pickle smiles later going down the customers’ gullets. Once, high on heroin at 6:30 in the morning, I passed out standing up with my hands in a bowl of coleslaw.
It can be fun having a little kitchen kingdom to yourself. Eventually, though, you get in trouble.
In January 2020 a few of the other kitchen staff and I developed a grudge against one of the waitresses. Fired up after a night of drinking and rehashing rumors, we decided to deliver an ultimatum. We showed up at the restaurant slurring and told the owner it was the waitress or us. The owner didn’t give in to our drunken demand, so we went “on strike.”
Three of my co-conspirators returned to work after a couple of days. I didn’t. It hardly mattered, though. COVID was bearing down on us, and the restaurant closed two months later. I never got to apologize to the owner, who succumbed to the virus. But once I was out of the kitchen, I finally got clean.
Matthew Mahler
Roanoke, Virginia
A raised pink scar sprawls across half of my mom’s back. I first noticed it as a teenager, but I waited until I was an adult to ask her about it. Her answer: “That’s none of your business.”
Growing up in an Asian family meant that dark feelings and ugly stories were generally off-limits. Conversations were never supposed to go beyond superficial updates about school, work, or relatives—which is why I found out that my cousin was raped only through whispers over the phone. It’s also why my parents didn’t know I was suicidal until a guidance counselor called the house, after being tipped off by a piece I’d submitted to a writing contest.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve strayed from the guardedness I was taught. I occasionally tease relatives about embarrassing memories at the dinner table, and I’m proud of that. I’ve seen the laughter and intimacy that come when we push the boundaries of what we are allowed to say to each other.
And I keep gently asking my mom about her scar: not to pry, but to connect. I hope one day she’ll share the story with me. I think it’ll bring us closer.
Name Withheld
In freshman year of art school I took an introductory watercolor class. The end-of-semester assignment was to create a work on a subject of our choosing.
My parents and I were sharing a house with my sister and her five-year-old son, and I’d become enchanted with my nephew’s artwork from school. For my assignment I tried to create something that expressed the exuberance of childhood: a cityscape of wobbly red-and-orange buildings topped with a smiling stick figure. Above the skyline was a large sun emitting bright bands of yellow against a blue sky. The picture technically fulfilled the assignment’s requirements, but I knew the stylized rendering was going to raise an eyebrow or two.
On the day our projects were due, our artwork was displayed for a class critique. I sat quietly at my desk, trying not to grin. Our teacher walked down the line of submissions, initiating a discussion about each piece.
When he reached my painting, he tried to discount it, but his comments led to a thought-provoking conversation about the purpose of art. A number of my fellow students argued that my simple piece was valuable and had accomplished my goal: to capture the joy of childhood.
Fifty years later I still smile when I look at the picture.
Gregg Grippo
Rochester, New Hampshire
After my high school graduation in 1974, I had two options: nursing school or community college. My mother, who had dropped out of nursing school to marry my dad when she got pregnant with me, told me to choose nursing. Ruthless teen that I was, I told her this was my life, not hers, and I took off to the beach, which was my solution to everything.
At a bonfire that night I met a tattooed guy who gave me swigs from his bottle of Boone’s Farm apple wine and drove me home on the back of his motorcycle. I staggered up the walk, threw up in the front garden, and then tried to slip into the house without being seen, but my dad caught me. I’d never seen him so upset.
“I won’t have my daughter pulling up like some biker chick,” he shouted. “Pack up! You’re going to Nana’s.”
Nana had a reputation for straightening out difficult kids. Plus, she was a retired nurse. I steeled myself for a serious lecture, followed by an arsenal of stories about the glories of nursing.
My grandmother met me at her door with a smile and told me to wash my hands. A bushel of peaches sat on the kitchen table, and canning jars were lined up on the counters. She set down two paring knives and winked mischievously. “Choose your weapon.”
She dissected her peaches with precision, while I stabbed at the orange flesh, replaying the scene with my dad in my mind. “What did that peach ever do to you?” she joked.
I began to relax in her company. Dad would have been livid. He hadn’t sent me there to enjoy myself. He wanted his mother to “pound some sense” into me, as he’d put it.
After we’d prepared the fruit, Nana handed me a pot and a wooden spoon. She coached me as I measured water and sugar and added pectin to the fragrant peaches. Bubbles formed, and the pot began to spit hot syrup.
“Keep stirring,” she told me. “This is your jam.”
That’s when it came to me: It might be cool to be like her.
Melissa Kazee
Niantic, Connecticut
The executive who’d been pretending I didn’t exist was coming down the hallway toward me. For seven days I’d been trying to get a meeting with him—seven days in which he’d elevated ignoring me into an art form: multiple dodged calls, twelve unopened emails, and three cancellations. As he approached, I jumped onto a table in my power suit and heels. I got his attention, and I got my meeting.
As the lone female manager among thousands of men in a Fortune 100 company, I was used to fighting to be seen. Being a pioneer isn’t glamorous, and occasionally it’s absurd.
Soon after I’d started at my job, my male colleagues had taken me to lunch—at a strip club. It was a test: Would I crack? Be embarrassed? I turned it into a business conversation, asking our server questions about tips, earnings, and management structure.
My presence in the company was an uncomfortable disruption. The men I worked with thought of women as mothers, sisters, and girlfriends. They certainly did not see us as bosses or even equals. But I loved my job, and my purpose was to ensure I had a seat at the table. That meant pushing, cajoling, and excelling.
We early women executives were often deemed “aggressive,” but we opened the door for the many women who followed.
Mary Bjustrom
Hoodsport, Washington
She was a family friend, but I was already in love with her when she came to spend Christmas with me, my husband, and our children. She brought English holiday traditions with her, including the recipe for a Christmas cake. She mixed the batter in a five-quart bowl and then called the rest of us into the kitchen. Each family member, starting with the youngest, had to “have a stir and make a wish.” She showed us how to grip the wooden spoon with one fist atop the other, then push it forward, back, left, and right through the heavy batter before slowly making a circle that ended with the spoon upright in the middle of the bowl. “Don’t let go of the spoon until your wish is made!” she instructed.
When it was my turn, I wished to spend the rest of my life with her.
Each Christmas she came to visit, and each Christmas I made the same wish. It turned out she was making that wish too. We’re married now, and every year we make the cake together. The wish never changes.
R.H.
Kjerrgarden, Norway
My mother had a history of deliberately generating tension be-tween my sister Linda and me. Linda and I were estranged for years because of falsehoods Mom had told each of us, but we reconciled after we discovered what she was up to. Mom was often jealous of the close bond my sister and I shared as adults.
One afternoon Mom invited the two of us to her senior-living facility and asked which of her belongings we’d each like to have upon her passing. We agreed that Linda would receive Mom’s diamond ring, and we’d split the other possessions. Mom made a list to attach to her will.
Several years later I received a note from Mom saying she’d like to give me her diamond ring for my sixtieth birthday. Puzzled, I called her and said, “That would be nice, but you promised the ring to Linda. I’ll have to check with her first.”
I texted a photo of the note to my sister and asked, “Didn’t Mom promise you her ring in her will?”
She said yes but generously told me to accept the gift.
“If you’re sure,” I replied.
Mom, of course, had to create fanfare. She organized a luncheon for Linda and me, our brother, and her friends. After we’d eaten, she handed me a beautifully wrapped gift and beamed as I opened it to find the ring.
A couple of weeks later Linda texted me a photo of a note she’d received from Mom, saying she had decided to give me the ring because I’d told her I wanted it.
When Linda didn’t reply to the note, Mom called her. “You’re not upset that I gave your sister my ring, are you?” Mom asked hopefully.
“Of course not,” Linda replied.
There was a long pause. “Well,” Mom said, “she had pestered me about it for years, so I finally folded.”
Rebecca Krell
Columbia, South Carolina
When I was young, my family had Sunday dinner with my grandparents every week. My father was their only remaining child—his brother, Billy, having drowned years before, leaving a pervasive sadness hanging over the house. There wasn’t much for a child to do there, so I’d sit on the back stoop before dinner and listen for birds or perch stiffly on the sofa to endure The Lawrence Welk Show.
One Sunday, out of boredom, I stole into the kitchen to watch Nanny Mac peel potatoes. She didn’t shoo me away, and I soon went from watcher to helper. She let me pull a step stool over to the stove, where she taught me how to stir the chocolate pudding over low heat until it was perfectly smooth, then pour it into glass parfait dishes to cool in the refrigerator. Later we’d whip cream with sugar to dollop on top. She told me this was her favorite dessert, but she’d never take even a bite, having given up chocolate as a sacrifice the day her Billy died.
Dessert at Nanny’s was always some sort of pudding: bread pudding, butterscotch custard, rice pudding. I loved them all. Tapioca took the most patience to make, and its rich, spicy smell would fill the air as we worked in silence at the stove. I treasured our time together in the kitchen, which felt solemn and ceremonial. We’d set the dining room table with the good china and crystal, even though it was just family, no guests. Feeding our family was a sacrament for Nanny.
Now I’m the nanny, calling the family together for Sunday dinners. We gave them up for nearly a year during the pandemic, then slowly returned to the ritual of weekly gatherings. I’m thankful for the lessons I learned from Nanny Mac, who dealt with loss by nurturing us.
Kathleen Moore
Rocklin, California
My opposition to my father’s worldview began one evening when I was eleven. He and I were watching Walter Cronkite together when our TV screen was filled with images of powerful water hoses being turned on Black children protesting in Birmingham, Alabama.
“It’s about time they put a stop to that nonsense,” my father growled. His response shocked me. How could this self-proclaimed Christian, a lay minister of our church, endorse such cruelty? Prior to that night I’d never heard a racist comment from him. I’d been proud of him, a World War II veteran who’d helped to liberate Italy. But his angry words changed everything.
My first act of defiance was joining Y-Teens, a racially integrated YWCA program in which Black and white girls worked side by side on community-service projects. In college I took part in an encampment against the Vietnam War and the Kent State massacre. My father threatened to cut me off financially when I participated in an antiwar march from my university to the state capitol, but my mother intervened.
After college I become an ardent antinuclear activist, protesting against the building of the Seabrook Station nuclear plant in New Hampshire. A few years later I discovered that my father had selected Russellville, Arkansas—his hometown, where I’d spent childhood summers—as the site for his company’s first nuclear power station. Incensed by his actions, I cowrote a handbook for opponents of the nuclear industry and worked with other ecofeminists to organize the 1980 and 1981 Women’s Pentagon Action protests.
My proudest act was a quiet one: I became a founding contributor to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. When I attended the museum’s opening, I was especially moved by the displays about the use of hoses against protesters in Birmingham. Now the wrongs that had motivated me could do the same for others.
My father hadn’t meant to offend me that night when I was eleven, and I’m certain he didn’t even notice he had. Yet his prejudice fueled my defiance for decades. I give him credit for igniting my activism in a way that abstract ideas or political discussions never could have.
Susan L. Koen
Belgrade Lakes, Maine
Most of the year the yellow pot sits nestled at the back of the cabinet. But at Thanksgiving she is a star, her corn silk exterior standing out among the other, less colorful cookware. On this special day I fill her with homemade stuffing and remember how she came into my life.
The pot was a wedding gift from my mom in 1970. The package arrived late, months after the wedding, but I was still moved by her thoughtfulness and generosity. I wasn’t sure how she scraped together the funds to purchase it. Le Creuset was quite costly then, as it is today. I thought she must have used some of the grocery money my father gave her. Only much later did I learn that she was secretly saving up so she could leave my father later that year.
Maybe the yellow pot symbolized how she’d wanted her life to be: a cut above her origins as the daughter of poor Irish parents, and later a mother of five in the suburbs of Boston. I’m sure she had hoped for more than the mental illness that befell her. She had been a gifted draftsman for Curtiss-Wright aircraft during World War II and was an amazing pianist with a rich soprano voice. Then her mind began playing tricks on her, ripping away dreams, relationships, and reality.
I wish I could thank her for this gift that I still lovingly use on special occasions in honor of her hopes for my life, and hers.
Name Withheld
The last time I contacted her, I sent a sun emoji: light and meaningless, just like our friendship had become.
Three years earlier we’d been randomly paired as “accountability partners” in a coaching program. We shared goals, scheduled check-ins, and traded encouraging words. She was upbeat and curious, and I liked her. But that version of her disappeared the day she took a job she hated. Our weekly calls turned into venting sessions about her coworkers, her commute, her lack of free time, her failing memory. I dreaded seeing her name pop up on my phone.
At first I offered advice. Then sympathy. Then silence. She didn’t seem to notice that I’d stopped talking. One Saturday she complained to me for forty-three minutes straight. After we hung up, I felt like I’d just folded someone else’s laundry.
I was done with our friendship but afraid to tell her I didn’t want to talk to her anymore, and I didn’t want to ghost her either. So instead I did something I’ve done more times than I care to admit to avoid confrontation: I made her uncomfortable.
She’d once shared half-baked plans to start a digital-marketing business, and I told her I wanted to coach her to her dream. I “helped” her by emailing her questions I knew she didn’t have answers to and scheduling meetings to discuss her goals.
At first she was intrigued, but soon she became evasive, canceling our appointments at the last minute. When she didn’t reply to my emails, I followed up with a text. She said she’d check in soon.
Weeks passed. One morning she texted, “Rise and shine.” I answered with a sun emoji, and that was the end. No drama. No arguments. Sometimes we stir the pot so we can finally walk away from the kitchen.
C.R.
Flagstaff, Arizona
My father always said that the secret to perfect payesh—the rich Bengali rice pudding scented with cardamom—is to reduce the milk by half to create the desired thick, creamy consistency. To accomplish this, the cook has to stir in slow swirls. As moisture gradually evaporates in puffs of steam, the white milk thickens into a golden cream, and the grains of rice grow plump. Only then can the cook add sugar and raisins. My dad strongly disapproved of using a microwave or a slow cooker or adding canned condensed milk. He insisted a proper payesh required time and attention.
I am a skilled home cook and can whip up complicated dishes like biriyani without breaking a sweat, but there is something about payesh that eludes me. I can never get the milk to thicken properly. I can’t coax the correct aroma out of the basmati rice. I once used a slow cooker and discovered that my father was right: the milk remained drippy, and the rice grains disintegrated.
My father passed away at the end of 2023. With him went the tradition of making payesh for family gatherings. What my father never said in his instructions is that payesh embodies the sacrifice needed to bring enjoyment to others. Standing in the heat of the kitchen with an arm growing increasingly sore from constant stirring requires a strength rooted in love.
Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay
Bethesda, Maryland
I grew up in a family that avoided directness at all costs. If something needed to be said, you didn’t say it to the person’s face; you told someone else, who would hopefully pass it along.
I became my mother’s favored messenger. I must admit, it felt good to have control over others’ emotions and to add my own twist to my mother’s words. I convinced myself I was helping to resolve difficult situations.
Around the age of ten I started to feel deeply uncomfortable in my own skin. By twelve I knew why: I was gay. In rural Appalachia in the 1970s, I couldn’t tell anyone. So, to deflect attention from myself, I perfected my skills at provocation. If people were busy talking about each other, I reasoned, maybe they wouldn’t talk about me.
Over the years I came to see how my meddling probably created more problems than it solved, and that I likely wasn’t fooling anyone the way I’d hoped. I began to loathe my behavior.
By the time I found the courage to change, my mother had already passed, but her love of back-channel conversations lived on in my relatives. In the end, the only way I could stop repeating the pattern was to distance myself from those relationships.
Ronald Stewart
La Paz, Mexico
In 1981 I helped lead a strike at an auto-parts factory in Chicago. In the first hour of picketing, a middle-aged employee named Willie and I were arrested. We were put in a jail cell across from a group of sex workers.
Willie was nervous. He had never been arrested before. To ease his mind, I told him that of the seven jails I’d spent time in, this was the cleanest. I also told him that we should talk to our cellmates about their pay and working conditions.
The ladies enthusiastically joined in the discussion, complaining about their “managers,” who let them sit in jail all night, and about certain johns and particular acts that should have brought higher pay. They were angry at the uneven split they had to give their managers. Willie told them that our union had fought for hazardous-duty pay and won. He and I stressed that, like all workers, they needed to organize and fight for better conditions.
As Willie and I were being released, one of the ladies hollered, “I like that guy with the glasses. I would do him for free.”
Hugh “Hawkeye” Tague
Lansdale, Pennsylvania
I stand over my pot of bone broth, watching for bubbles. The broth will become cloudy if it’s allowed to boil. When the liquid reaches a simmer, I lower the heat. Bone broth has become the elixir du jour, though practitioners of Chinese medicine have utilized it for centuries. The recipe in The Cancer-Fighting Kitchen calls for roasting bones from pasture-raised cows before adding them to a stockpot with onion, celery, parsley, garlic, ginger, and root vegetables.
After a precipitous weight loss, my husband, Steve, was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. CLL is generally slow-growing, but his lymph nodes soon began to swell, and his internist found a baseball-size mass in his abdomen. His oncologists prescribed chemotherapy as well as supplements, meditation, interval training, and six daily servings of vegetables with swigs of green tea. They do not believe he will die of the disease, but we are hedging our bets.
At times my efforts to save Steve feel frantic. I have come to realize it is not only Steve I’m trying to save, but myself. My mother and grandmother both lost their husbands in midlife—one to sudden death, the other to divorce. Unable to cope on their own, both women ended their lives in their late sixties.
My mother’s maiden name was Stone, and that’s how I thought of her—staunch, invincible—before she was overcome by loneliness and depression. My husband seemed stalwart too, until he wasn’t. As I make the bone broth to nourish him, I hope I can cultivate my own strength.
Alberta Nassi
Sacramento, California
I live in one of five houses on a mile-long gravel road. The house across from mine is occupied by Sam and Lea. Sam retired this year and spends hours sitting on a child-size chair in his driveway, digging grass from between the stones. I suggested he use a vinegar-and-salt mix to kill the grass—I spray it on the weeds in my flower beds—but he said digging the grass by hand is his penance. (I have no idea what for, since he’s one of the nicest guys I know.) I give Sam and Lea strawberries from my garden every spring. When my other neighbors pass my house, they’ll stop to compliment me on my flowers and to chat about our kids.
I know to stay away from weightier topics than family and gardening. Though I live in a red state, I’m liberal on almost every issue. I was one of the few people on our road to get the COVID vaccine, and I attend all the demonstrations against the current administration at the capitol building in town. I have a peace symbol hanging on my front door and a pride bumper sticker on my Prius.
Though I’m sure my neighbors are aware of my views, I don’t bring them up when we talk. I figure the best thing I can do to represent my liberal values is to share my produce and speak kindly.
Renee Bauer-Wolf
Lohman, Missouri
When I was in college, my mother decided to start a chicken-slaughtering business. As is typical in Filipino families, everyone was expected to participate. Before sunrise a large truckload of cages would arrive at an empty lot my mother rented near our house. Each chicken would be taken from its cage, killed, blanched in hot water, then plucked. (We had no training in this process except for some questionable tips from a friend.) We packed the chickens in coolers for delivery to local restaurants in Manila.
We had only one family vehicle, and whoever took it to school or work had to deliver chickens. My route to college included several delivery stops. When I arrived at the strip joint, the security guard asked if I was there to audition. “No, sir, I’m just here with the chicken,” I said, raising two fifteen-pound bags as proof.
Sometimes, after the day’s deliveries were done, there would be unsold chicken parts left over. Mama made them into family meals so as not to waste them.
One evening, lying in my bedroom, I smelled intestines being cooked in the kitchen. Chicken intestines are a popular street food in the Philippines, looped on skewers in a pattern that has earned them the nickname “IUD on a stick.” I trusted the street vendors to properly clean the intestines, but I wasn’t so sure about Mama, stirring her pot of entrails. I pushed a towel under the door to squelch the stench and feigned fullness at dinner.
Another night my sister and I were called downstairs. On the table sat a large pot of steaming broth. I dipped the ladle into the soup, and several chicken claws floated to the top. I dipped it again, searching for an alternative; there were no other parts to be had. Just claws.
These foods are Philippine delicacies, enjoyable (and safe) in the hands of people who are knowledgeable about their preparations. I’ve eaten IUD on a stick, and my sister can chow down on roasted claws with gusto. But the pot on the table that evening was a bit much, even for us.
Amihan Ferrer
Olympia, Washington
I should have left well enough alone.
We’d grown used to the silence, which sat between us like a guest who’d overstayed their welcome. Then one evening I made the stew you liked, with dried fish and okra—the one that reminded us of the beginning of our relationship, when everything felt light and possible.
You came home late, tired and distracted. As you spooned stew from your bowl, I thought it might be safe to speak the truth.
“I miss us,” I said.
You didn’t look up.
I pushed on. “I don’t know when we stopped trying. But I want to try again. I don’t want to lose you.”
There it was. I’d hoped the warmth of the memory would soften you. That you’d remember the way we used to collapse into laughter; the morning we made love on the floor because we couldn’t make it to the bed; the days when hearing your key in the door made my whole body ease.
You set your spoon down and sighed.
“I don’t know if I can go back there,” you said. “I don’t even know if that version of me still exists.”
You weren’t angry. You weren’t cruel. You were just . . . gone. Like erosion, slow and devastating.
I should have stayed quiet. Instead I’d reached for something I hoped was still alive. I’d believed in the version of us that danced barefoot in the kitchen, that thought love could survive family expectations and cultural weight and slow heartbreak.
Now I live with the echo of that moment: the smell of the stew, the sound of your spoon against the bowl, and the truth that we didn’t fall apart in anger. We faded in the silence.
Audu Happiness
Ayingba, Nigeria
In my twenties and thirties I stirred the pot politically. I was one of hundreds of people who surrounded the Los Angeles federal building to decry the US’s involvement in the Salvadoran Civil War, locking arms and chanting, “Stop the bombing, stop the war, US out of El Salvador!” I wrote an opinion column in my small town’s weekly paper, airing my views about the first Gulf War and the racism manifest in certain Supreme Court decisions.
Eventually I grew tired of hearing myself complain and decided that, rather than criticize the leaders I thought were doing wrong, I would work to accomplish a goal I believed in. I ended up running a homeless shelter and developing low-income-housing programs, putting my self-righteousness to use advocating for funding and services.
After decades of working with state and federal officials, my view of stirring the pot has changed. In cooking we stir to blend ingredients and get the flavors to cooperate. There always have been and always will be things to rail against. My questions now are: How do we blend? How do we love our neighbors as ourselves? How do we properly stir the melting pot our country is supposed to be?
Bill Miller
Wilbraham, Massachusetts
