Kindred Spirits

Anne Shirley was right: finding kindred spirits can be hard work.

When I first moved to this area, I had to start the friend-making process all over again. I hate this process. It’s one thing to have to deal with annoying people when you’re already established, but when you’re alone and desperately searching for a friend, each new annoying person sent your way seems to be a slap in the face from Fate. You start to get disheartened. You start to wonder if maybe nobody listens to you because you’re inherently boring, or because you say dumb things all the time.

One afternoon I found myself eating lunch with my new friend Rebecca, and a bunch of guys we sort of knew. Mostly they shoveled their food into their mouths with forklifts, interrupted me, or mocked everything I said. Oh, you knit? Do you play with dolls, too? Ha ha ha. We’re so funny, it’s amazing.

Eventually they started comparing notes on video game strategies and left us alone. I was relieved. Thinking we were free to talk about what we wanted, Rebecca and I started exchanging bread recipes, which led me to pontificate on the origins of this most ancient of food staples.

“I mean, think about it,” I said. “Who looked at a stalk of wheat and said, ‘Huh, I wonder if you can eat that?’ Isn’t that incredible? Who decided to try making bread out of wheat?”

“As opposed to what, a tree?” said one of the guys.

“Heh heh heh!” said the other big stupid chowderheads, who between them could not manage to open up a can of Chef Boy-R-Dee. “Right, yeah, a tree! Heh heh heh!” Oh, I was surrounded by wits that day.

That really pissed me off. The only thing that saved them from a fork in the thigh was my screwy desire to be nice and pleasant all the time. I mean, come on! My point was, if someone were to plop me down in the wilderness, I wouldn’t know what to eat and what not to eat. I’d probably manage to poison myself within three days. And these guys would starve if you plopped them down in the middle of a supermarket, so I shouldn’t have been surprised at their lack of imagination when it comes to the miracle of bread making. No appreciation whatsoever.

And you know what, they probably would eat a tree. You could have fed them woodchips and hedge clippings and they wouldn’t have noticed so long as you drowned it all in ketchup.

Luckily for me, kindred spirits are not impossible to find – it just takes a bit of searching. Recently I was having dinner with my friend Jason, and out of the blue he started praising our ancestors for their culinary genius.

“Who figured out how to make pasta?” he said in amazement. “It’s incredible. Who figured out how to make wheat into flour? And then add water and eggs to it? And then press it out real thin, and cut it up, and dry it, only to cook it again in a big pot of boiling water? It’s so complicated. And then there’s the sauce. I mean, did someone just wake up one day and say, ‘Huh, I think I’ll take this red thing, and this white smelly tear-producing thing, and these green things, and I’ll make a sauce,’ and boom, you’ve got pasta and tomato sauce?”

“Jason,” I said, “I love you.”