Mrs. Child and Her Sieve

If your life were a blurb on the back of a book jacket, how would it read?

Don’t think of this as your high school comp. teacher asking you to write your own obituary. Consider it an exercise in sifting life down to its little moments of ecstasy. What--and who--are you going to remember? The Foreword and book jacket cover of Julia Child’s, “My Life in France,” simply states,

“This is a book about some of the things I love most in life—my husband, Paul Child, ‘la belle France’ and the many pleasures of cooking and eating.”
A man. An emotion. The daily joys of life.

Mrs. Child began her book (along with Alex Prud ‘Homme) at the ripe age of 91. I’m sure there were innumerable moments, delights and people to consider. They all beg for a mention in her culinary memoir. The people that she eventually chooses to write about are immortalized in culinary circles. And the others, well…

My “quarter life crisis” (courtesy of the imitable, ingenious singer, John Mayer)—my mid-20’s—have been a sentimental sieve. I’ve cut people out of my life. I’ve added a few new faces. I’ve met men that I adore. I’ve met many more men that I abhor (at least, I detest what they stand for). And, still, there are those people that float in that nebulous world of personal purgatory—do I like them, trust them, really know them? Rather, after reading some of Mrs. Child I can ask, “Will they be part of the book blurb?”

God willing I’ll figure myself (and my needs) out by age 30. Until then, I’m still searching for that one sentence that sums up me, who I love and my life’s ecstasy...