Collecting Strays at the Thanksgiving Table

X-post from Cooking & Baking, http://www.democraticunderground.com/115761737

'I was so homesick my freshman year of college that my cousins bought me a plane ticket to come home to Nashville for Halloween.

Halloween! It was a fantastic extravagance, the unintended consequence of which was that I really couldn’t come home three weeks later for Thanksgiving and then turn right back around and come home for Christmas. I would have to spend Thanksgiving at school.

Though I had some budding college friendships, none of them were close enough that first semester to rate an invitation to someone else’s house for the holidays. I went to Sarah Lawrence College, a half-hour north of Manhattan. I lived in a nice dorm that had once been someone’s house. There was a kitchen downstairs. I figured I could sit tight and wait out the long weekend.

Were I to put a pin in the map of my life and say, here, this is where adulthood began, I would place it on that Thanksgiving weekend in 1981. I was 17 years old. . .

On that freezing holiday weekend when my adult life began, I not only learned to cook, I learned to read. There was no improvisation. If the recipe said two teaspoons of chopped fresh sage, that’s what went into the pot. Beat the egg whites for seven minutes? I looked at my watch and went to work.

I did not glance at those instructions, I followed them, so that even now when someone claims they don’t know how to cook, I find myself snapping, “Do you know how to read?” Paying close attention to the text, and realizing that books can save you: Those were the lessons I learned my freshman year of college when school was closed. I then went on to use this newfound understanding to great advantage for the rest of my life.'>>>

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/well/family/collecting-strays-at-the-thanksgiving-table.html?