You may well ask: Who am I and why am I writing this book? More importantly, why are you reading it?
Someone once asked me in a job interview, what my greatest strength was. I usually hate questions like this. They often seem irrelevant to the task at hand. This time I heard myself answering in a way I hadn’t planned. I said, ‘I am a person who has lived out all of my enthusiasms.’ I have pursued most of my best ideas and some of the not so good ones. I have enjoyed it most of the time and have accepted the consequences of having done it. It has lead to a richness of experience I would not have known if I had done only what was expected.
Of course, the first question was followed by the second, what is your greatest weakness. This almost brought me to tears as I answered, ‘I am a person who has lived out all of my enthusiasms.’ I have never known the certainty of absolute conviction. I have never made a life-long commitment, or truly known what I was meant to be.
Once in a very un-woman’s-libbish moment I lamented the burden of too many possibilities. How was I supposed to choose? Perhaps that is why we all seem to long for simpler times. My antidote to this kind of melancholy has always been to take up the next opportunity presented and pursue it with enthusiasm. A life spent tearing off in any new direction at the drop of a hat makes a significant pause for reflection necessary to avoid a permanent state of confusion, if not insanity.
I am writing this book for myself first, to document the many careers I have pursued that sometimes seem disjointed and illogical. Perhaps in doing so I will find pattern and purpose. Secondly, I write this to honor my family which seemed so large to me as a small child, but now has dwindled with the loss of prior generations. I also write to preserve something of the way of life that I experienced which now seems more part of the past than the present.
If you are not a member of my family feeling obligated to read this one and only effort at authorship, you might read it just to see if the grass really is greener on the other side of the fence. (I suspect not.)
There's your answer: Curiosity is the best reason to read this book. That, and my Grandmother’s recipes for Anadama Bread, Buckwheat Cakes, Sugar Cookies, and, O yes!, my other Grandmother’s Garlic Cereal, and . . .
