My grandmother is a really impressive cook, says just about everyone with a grandmother ever. Mine is the decadent kind, a Jewish Paula Dean whose butter is garlic and minced onion lathered in olive oil. Her specialty is spaghetti and meatballs. She has given me the recipe four times, and, demonstrating total sacrilegious treatment of precious goods, I've lost it three. Each time the instructions become more vague, teaspoons turning into hand-fulls, "measure" lost to "eyeball," until my culinarily challenged mind has no idea what it's doing.
Even so, I decided to replicate the dish for one of my friends. I went to a ridiculously expensive grocery store and bought ridiculously expensive olive oil and organic angel hair, sourdough bread from Watsonville, minced onion and paprika in little plastic bags... for a college student, I may have gone a little far, but in the name of friendship and yolo it all felt good and well. The result, achieved only through a painstaking hour spent transforming an entire loaf of bread into homemade breadcrumbs (my grandmother does not fuck around) may not have been on par with its potential godliness, but it at least breached the bottom of heaven. I served it with a sliced mango and ginger ale. There is nothing like making dinner for a friend.
Especially when that friend is so authentically enthusiastic and cognizant of the details, the little things you didn't think anyone else would appreciate, capable of turning your (kind of haphazard) gesture into a full-scale conversation about good food from a global perspective and why we combine eating and socializing, and the importance of strong, soul-deep friendships. I didn't save this for the meatballs. This girl is nothing short of passion incarnate, and I can't convey the way she speaks, but I did record a rough memory of what she said, which goes as follows. I wanted to write about it because it's just so great-- and because I feel complexly about it.
"The best kind of love, in my opinion, is the kind you give because it's a pleasure to give it. And it's selfless, it's unconditional and passionate. I can honestly say that I love you, and what I mean by that is that I would do anything for you. I would wake up at 3:00 AM and talk to you on the phone if you needed it. And I love that way not to be loved in return but because I think that's the kind of love worth having."
I feel like this person a lot. I have been this person for strangers with the hope of being this person for everybody. I was touched by the sentiment from another person, deeply, like someone pelted with rain they don't feel until one drop finally creeps into the space between the back of their sweater and the back of their neck and swims down. I was having a lonely fall quarter. Love, deep, unconditional love, was exactly what I wanted and hadn't wanted to hope for.
And yet. I wonder. Because love, aside from being the thing we always talk about, the thing of all things, is a funny thing. I think I understand it and then it turns into something else and says "that isn't what I meant, look again," and I see it differently. I hold onto pieces of what I've experienced and rearrange them, integrate them into new pieces, until my experience with love is like a constantly shifting collage. I suppose that's the way it should be.
How are we supposed to do it? What should the goal be, what's best for everyone? I look at the love my friend was talking about now and think about how much you have to trust to have that. You have to trust the other person. You have to trust yourself. And largely, you have to decide you'd rather feel that way than worry about how it's going to affect you, which is relatively easy and can be totally fulfilling... but it can also yield a tough pill to swallow. And I think we do need to be loved in return. I think we deserve to. My grandmother, one who doesn't cook (aka, my most likely gene source) loves so fully and desperately sometimes that there's no way to love her so fully and desperately back... and she absolutely needs it. She needs something, a sliver of it to live on at the very least.
There are the people who I've shared all these deep, lovely expressions of love with-- and there are, in some cases among them, the people who have gone their separate ways. And the phases in my own life that have demanded a shutting down of both the need and the giving, the numb construction of an emotional fence. I can appreciate the hell out of someone Elizabeth Gilbert pre-travel style, giving them "my time and my dog's time" and all kinds of credit for the little things, but I'm harder than I used to be. And I no longer feel like I can, or should, give that kind of love to everybody all the time, something a lot of people probably already accept and see no trouble with. Sometimes there are slower, tougher loves that love simply by requiring someone else to earn it, and it's better for everyone.
But I love building affectionate relationships with people. I love the friendships that feel that way even if they dissipate. People say "yours always," and sometimes they have no idea how wrong they'll be. But I don't think that means we shouldn't say it, even if we know on some level or learn. I think we should say it anyway. And I know, sitting here at twenty muddling through this stuff, that I'll be revising and rearranging how I feel for a long time, but if anything, that makes it all the more interesting to think about.
I know I know, this post is the size of China. I missed talking to the internet.
