Humans connect over meals. In a culture where people are encouraged to constantly appear busy, this time of connection can easily get lost or forgotten. We have all experienced how difficult it is to keep good habits. As an observer of and participant in this experimental time, it is impossible for me to completely remove myself from the mad discarding of the sacred which is taking place in our society. One might observe that the Albanian people seem to know better than Amerikans when it comes to connection and family, consistency and tradition. I believe that they know better simply by default.
There is a wisdom to traditional life, both spoken and unspoken. Wise living is a tradition of no small craft. Countless years of cultural evolution have resulted in numerous flawed yet sustainable, simple, systems for living. Those systems have family members eating food together. Those systems declare that two people, when eating together, are participating in a sacred familial act.
In honor of my birthday yesterday, my little sister Anne took me out for lunch. Yester-evening I ate with six of the finest people I know. Tonight my mother treated me to ahi and fire pasta at the Powerhouse Brewery in Puyallup, Washington. We talked about family for the most part. She made an observation which was no small flattery. She told me that I remind her of her father. “And my father was a good man,” she reminded me. “A man with simple tastes, maybe, but a good man,” she concluded.
Any man who can look down from heaven on three such fine children must have simple tastes indeed. A taste for meals at home, for his wife’s cooking. A taste for gatherings in state parks with siblings and outdoor fare. A taste for oranges taken from the toes of stockings on Christmas morning. My grandfather left me an amazing mom. How did he do that?
albaniacalling 