This has been a strange, limbo-like week for me. I’m still getting over my chest cold. My kids have been leaving our home, for their fall plans, in dribs and drabs. We will take my youngest son up to his apartment, on his college campus, this Friday, and my daughter starts her online classes for her junior year of high school on Monday. The other two boys are already away, doing their thing. My husband just ordered more home office equipment, as what has always felt like sort of a temporary situation – this working from home, is five months into being semi-permanent. I guess that our “official fall schedule” will start on Monday. So, this week, I feel like I am just treading water. This good-bye to summer is dragging out. I’m a little over this “long good-bye.” I’m ready for the next thing. As it is said, the best is yet to come, and I am ready to swim towards it.
Earlier this week we watched a show called, Street Food Latin America. This was a tricky challenge for me, to watch a show centering on delicious food, because I am trying to not eat after dinner every night, as an attempt to shed some of the pandemic pounds that I have put on. Still, the show was a good watch and the most intriguing cook on Street Food Latin America, was a woman named Pato Rodriguez. Her food stand, in the middle of the busy central Buenos Aires mercado, was obviously her life’s passion. In the show, she says that her customers ask her why she doesn’t have any children and she says, “You, my customers, are my children, and you are very spoiled!” And her customers were obviously spoiled. Her concoctions looked amazing. Even though she runs an unassuming food stand in the middle of a giant mercado, Pato Rodriguez has attracted famous Argentinian food critics to come to her stand, and to write about her amazing delicacies (the same writers who do the reviews for Michelin rated restaurants). When someone is absolutely “one with what they do”, so obviously living their passions and their dreams, their joy just oozes out of them. It can’t contain itself, and that joy is so contagious. I instantly liked Pato and I wished for her, nothing but a life filled with continued zeal for her cooking and sharing it with others. I could feel her deep enthusiasm for her life’s work through my TV screen. Here is a quote that she said, that was so right on the money, that I made my husband pause our viewing, so that I could write it down verbatim:
“I realized that people eat first with their eyes, then with their mouths, and then with their hearts.” _ Pato Rodriguez
That quote really made me ponder about how much it applies not only just to food, but to anything that we end up loving in life. At first we see something or someone who intrigues and captivates us, we devour our experience with that thing or that person or that place, and then, no matter what the outcome, whether the experience was a decidedly good one, or a mostly negative one, the moments of our focus on that particular happening in our lives, are imprinted on our hearts forever. The book of our lives, chapter by chapter, is kept in the cozy, safe, warm library of our heart. And we can open the book up and we can read it, and we can savor the experiences or at the very least, learn from the experiences, again and again and again. Our heart stores it all for us. As summer is closing, let a new chapter begin, and may it be one of the very best chapters, in each of our books!