Cameron Stracher - Dinner with Dad: How I Found My Way Back to the Family Table

CONTENTS

For Christine, Simon, and Lulu.

And you may find yourself in a beautiful house,
With a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself
Wellhow did I get here?

T ALKING H EADS, Once in a Lifetime

Its 7:37 P.M . Do You Know Where You Are?

I am running for the train at Grand Central when I see him: a man, about six two, thin, shoulders beginning to hunch prematurely, balding, prominent nose and cheekbones. He carries a laptop case slung over one shoulder and a gym bag over the other. His eyes have the weary look of a man who has not yet had dinner but suspects it may be too late. One hand darts nervously to his ear, holding a cell phone or a BlackBerry. The other hand clutches the bag as if its his last best chance. He looks left, then right, like a skittish cat, as he navigates the crowd loitering at the fast-food stalls, ducks oncoming traffic, and dashes for the train.

I follow him through the platform doors. For a moment I lose him at the bottom of the stairs, then he reappears by the second car. A gray man in a gray suit, chewing nervously on his lip. An apparition. A reflection. A warning.

My doppelgnger.

If he notices our resemblance, he doesnt acknowledge it as he surveys the crowded car from the vestibule, then chooses a seat near the front. He withdraws a soft pretzel from his gym bag, breaks off a piece, and chews slowly and deliberately as he slumps against the window. I continue past him and sit at the other end of the car.

The train is filled with lawyers, bankers, and advertising executives making their evening run up the golden corridor of Metro-Norths New Haven line: Greenwich, Stamford, Darien, Westport, Southport, Fairfield. It is a commute with which I have become too familiar in the four years since I left Manhattan. A commute I never thought I would be making. A commute that sucks the soul from me in great gulps and fouls the air like the smell from the backed-up bathrooms and the socks of the hedge fund trader who insists on putting his feet on the vinyl seat.

It is 7:37 P.M. I am late. Again.

M y life took a turn for the worse when I stopped making dinner. Not all at once, but gradually, stealthily, until the life I had lived resembled nothing at all of the life I was living. One day I was carefree, creative, happy, and loving; fifteen years later I was impatient, claustrophobic, angry, depressed, and resentful. Once I had been thoughtful, romantic, attentive. Now I ignored my wife and stomped about the house. Once I had dreamed of a certain success, now I dreamed of dreaming. I took pills to help me sleep, and pills to keep me awake, and pills to smooth the transition between the two.

I can see the moment of transition as clearly as if I graphed it. But at the time its not as if I could have said: Here, this is where everything will go downhill. If anything, when I moved back to New York I thought my life was beginning its upward trajectory. Little did I know.

I learned to enjoy cooking during my first years out of college. In a sweltering Somerville apartment I made my first jambalaya in a huge cast-iron skillet. In graduate school in Iowa City, traveling, to the food co-op was one of the highlights of my day. Buying beans in bulk, grinding my own peanut butter, discovering locally roasted coffee was almost too much fun for a single person. Sure enough, I met my wife at the co-op. In a little black dress and a pair of Doc Martens, she was serving cheese and crackers to discriminating shoppers. Our love blossomed as we experimented with making our own garam masala and ghee. Warm afternoons spent baking samosas. Black bean burritos, fried wontons, and scrambled tofu. Neither of us was an expert, but we were energetic, and willing to try anything at least once. With each new meal we wooed each other, expanding our repertoire as we broadened our affection. Making food together was almost as much fun as sleeping together, and often led directly to itthe bedroom was right off the kitchen. Dinner was the first step of a dance that would last the rest of our lives. Or so we thought.

Soon, Christines Moosewood Cookbook sat on the shelf next to my Joy of Cooking. My Classic Italian Cooking. Her Greens Cookbook. She was twenty-five, red-haired, blue-eyed, her lips like something to rest on. I was thirty and still fit enough to work out with the Iowa track team. I had postponed a career in law to write the Great American Novel and fallen in love with a poet from Idaho. We spent three years living together on East College Street, reading Marianne Moore and Alan Dugan, Michael Cunningham and Marilynne Robinson. When it was time to leave, we took our spices with us, jars with labels we handwrote: coriander, cumin, rosemary, thyme.

At first, New York City seemed the perfect move for a couple whose first date was at the only authentic Mexican restaurant in eastern Iowa. Within a few blocks of our Upper West Side apartment, we were surrounded by culinary representatives from most of Latin America as well as India, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Ethiopia, and the entire European continent. But life would be different in New York, as I quickly learned when the managing partner at my law firm called me in to his office to tell me he had noticed I wasnt working as late as my colleagues. Most of the associates ate dinner together in the firms small conference room, and I was conspicuously absent. My hours had suffered, as had my work. His warning made me realize I was going to lose my job unless I ate dinner with the other lawyerswhom I barely knew and didnt care for. We werent in Iowa anymore.

For the next few years I ate from some of New Yorks best restaurantsin the comfort of a windowless roomas I learned to ply a trade about which I was ambivalent at best. The law was not the intellectual challenge I had expected, but a dull grind through a mountain of paper: tedious, amoral, and merciless. I brought home leftovers for my wife, who had taken to ordering in from Burritoville or Ollies while she graded English papers. Our tiny kitchen barely held enough food for breakfast, let alone a full meal. When we did eat togetheron weekends and vacationscooking was a distant memory. Instead, we subsisted on white cartons, aluminum containers, and plastic utensils. I rose most mornings at five to continue writing what would become my first novel, while the buses and garbage trucks rumbled below on Broadway.

The birth of our son and then our daughter forced my wife back to the kitchen. But it was a journey she made alone. As it was for many Manhattan parents with small children in a cramped two-bedroom apartment, mealtime was a multistage affair: kids, then adults, then leftovers. Though Christine managed to turn out the occasional dish with tofu or chickpeas, the logistics of preparing a meal for four in a kitchen with two burners, one chair, and no oven rarely flamed the culinary imagination. The living room doubled as a dining room; the sink became a table, and the food pyramid an Egyptian hieroglyphic. Strange smells from other apartments wafted up the hallways, few of them inspiring confidence in the gastronomic talents of our neighbors, most of whom we avoided as we clanged up and down the elevator. If New York was a melting pot, there were some funky things burning.