Fine Company and Home Cooking

On 10 December, I invited a number of friends over for dinner, company, and conversation. I have already posted the menu--which may excite a few friends' fancies--and want to say a little on the night and its success.

Since I have come home from school, I have tried a few times to rediscover the lovely comfort and pleasure of late nights in with familiar faces. A handful of soirees were arranged, but not until the tenth did anything come of them. Such turns of fortune dismayed me because despite apparent commitment and with all the places in order, my exertions were for naught. My last year at Gustavus allowed my friends and I to make a distinctly special and welcoming space. More often than not, we would gather at the end of the day, chatter, sip our beverages, watch this or that DVD, joke about, and make something of the evening that was fortifying and refreshing. I acknowledge and appreciate the cooperation of proximity, amicability, and space that allowed my last year to have such a space, but making something of my current situation should not have been so fraught with difficulty.

All the same it has been. I am a good deal further away from where most of my friends live in Lincoln, schedules are more convoluted than ever, organization and transportation are regular issues, and I do not have as much familiarity with the people hear. So thorough did I think these problems were, that I could not even guarantee my guests' attendance to myself until they started showing up. Almost immediately, though, their attendance rejuvenated me in a wonderfully familiar way. We gathered around fresh, home cooked food, a few glasses of wine (which grew beyond a few as the night wore on), and so easily warmed to one another's presence. In at least one way, the night was particular; particular such that my company's attendance meant more than the usual. In another way, the night took on a distinct variety of particularity; that is, as we sat, conversing by the fire over glasses of wine, we all came to recognize that feeling for which I had been yearning, that knowledge of our shared joy because of and respect for each other.

My guest list extended beyond attendees, but I want to thank Miss Kim Moser, Miss Abbey Coleman, Miss Ashley Buck, Mr Ryan Hansen, and the late but well-received Miss Adrienne Lemmer for coming to my birthday party. My mother's assistance and attendance ought also be respectfully recognized and appreciated, as well. Over the past few years--perhaps with their emphasis on finals schedules and that interest in twenty-first anniversaries--I have become uninterested in the celebration of my own birthday, but wanted to take the opportunity to celebrate something all the same. The subject of my birthday was of little notice during the dinner, though wine and a bag of baking supplies were generously given, and in its way, that was the best of possible outcomes. I was not engaged in celebrating my own birth, in picking up trinkets from friends (however heartfelt they would certainly be), but in appreciating and sharing their kindness and friendship.

After much gustatory delight and enlivened engagement, we moved ourselves to the family room to share in the glow and warmth of the fire and the comfort of softer furniture. Many attendees are acquainted with the study and practice of education, and following our own anecdotes, we began to introspect more seriously on the subject of pedagogy. Education, one might recognize, is a rather easy subject over which to engage because we share in both its successes and its shortcoming so thoroughly. The systems we experienced blessed and impeded us in different ways, some of us more severely than others, and it supported an intimacy in our storytelling and consideration that was uncommonly close to home. Childhood, schooling, the ins and outs of cliques and friendships, interactions with teachers, each open into--even without our knowing--onto our private psyches and traumas, our challenges and warm-hearted successes. I was happily overwhelmed--in no physically obvious way, my guests might have noted--by the conversational affection with which we came to regard one another in order to open up so intensely.

The night languorously wore on, marked by the opening of another bottle and the slow lisp of fatigue eking into our voices. After much leaning, yawning, and gentle support from one another, I sent my friends off with little packages of leftover food--I certainly didn't want a half lasagna taking up space in my refrigerator. Mr Hansen stayed a while longer so that we might play long delayed video games, shooting down the menace of zombies an hour or so later. He too left with a few pieces of lasagna and I lay down to enjoy the end of Franklyn which I had started in my cleaning and tidying of the house but had not finished. Given that I was unaware of attendance, I was awake longer than I had supposed, but happily so, and slept late into the following day. The next day, each item cluttered on tables, counters, and the floor seemed a quiet, happy testament to the past night.