A long, meandering piece that travels many places, arrives nowhere in particular; a small bit for Sunday Scribblings

There's a mercury retrograde coming soon, and the finely tuned antennae of the Gemini with whom I share my life seem to be already picking up on its chaos-inducing energy. Last week was a week filled with missed cues, misunderstandings and miscommunication, sudden failures, unexplained bumps and bruises, appointments, appointments with repair technicians, unexpected visitors, and a confluence of scheduled social engagements that somehow all landed on the seven days following our return from the lake. So much for thinking about sending out my plans for the year out to the parents of next year's students. Maybe this week.

In case you were interested: it is not a good sign when the first thing asked by the repair technician sent to fix your obviously overpriced totally defunct cooktop is "Do you have a copy of the manual for this thing?"

The Sunday Scribblings prompt this week was "Adult". Here's my take: being an adult means facing up to life, whatever comes your way. Some weeks I act like an adult; some weeks I don't. Last week, I wanted to run and hide.

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About Julia Child's My Life in France... it's possible I've set some expectations for a complete review that I'm not entirely ready to fulfill. But here are some notes:

If you somehow missed the synopsis of this memoir in the deluge of stories that accompanied the release of Julie & Julia, the book is as the title describes: the story of Julia's life in France, that period after World War II when she & her husband, Paul, moved to Paris, where he would be responsible for promoting French-American relations through the visual arts, and where Julia would come to promote French-American relations in her own inimitable style.

It is, above all, a love story. There is that famous first meal she ate in France at the restaurant in Rouen, the sole meunière that she described (to the NYT) as "an opening up of the soul and spirit for me". It was an awakening and an introduction to French cooking that drove her determination to make it her own; the encounter that led her, eventually, to writing Mastering the Art of French Cooking: the quest that defined the rest of her life.

OK. That's overblown AND an oversimplification. It wasn't just a love affair with French food that led Julia to write MTAOFC; it was her desire to recreate these experiences for her husband, who also loved this food, and her conviction that the secrets to cooking well and enjoying wonderful food ought to be available to everyone. These were the deep sustaining bass notes of the underlying love affairs that kept Julia going during the years it took to research, write, and find a publisher for The Book.

By modern standards, Julia's memoir is striking in its limited emotional revelation, her refreshing lack of interest in her own fears or feelings: her passion is all for the people around her, the experiences she enjoyed; there's passion, and the desire to do right by her passions and everything she loves. As Paschal's wise commencement speaker said earlier last week: Love wins. Love ALWAYS wins. And so does Julia. So much love; makes every word of this memoir worth reading.

Julia always claimed to be a cook rather than a chef, a distinction that to modern ears, with our elevation of Latinate words over common Anglo-Saxon ones, comes across as self-deprecating. For Julia, though, the difference was only technical, a matter of scale: a chef was in charge of a restaurant, responsible for directing the battalions of butchers, sous chefs, and other trained staff required to carry out the mission of preparing food for a hundred or more diners every night; a cook prepared food at home, for the people who would be sharing a meal with her. That was all.

So it is interesting to me that so many people insist on calling Julia Child a chef, as if to deny her that title would be to deny her the level of creativity and imagination we all associate with her. In that way, it reminds me of the disparaging way students in college used to refer to performers of all types: as if playing music or playing a part were just a matter of getting the right notes or saying the right words in the right order; that if you were really creative you would be creating your own music or writing your own plays.

That's a topic that deserves a lot more exploration. But even when it comes to something as apparently easy following a recipe, how simple is it to to do only that, without leaving any trace of personal judgment -- your determination of "simmering nicely," or "seasoned to taste"? Very hard indeed. Just try duplicating your friend's wonderful green bean salad from the recipe she gave you. Even if you're happy with the results, chances are that somebody will notice that it doesn't taste quite same as the dish they remember.

The fact is, any attempt to make anything at all requires a level of interaction with whatever materials you're using that can only be described as creative; it is a kind of formation that alters your way of thinking, changes your perspective. As Julia Child remarked, through practice, through making mistakes, she began "to feel la cuisine bourgeoise in my hands, in my stomach, in my soul."

So. Being a cook is a creative job. Let me take take this idea one step further and suggest that eating is also a creative job. If you don't believe me, then consider what it means to take communions, or, if you're reluctant to return to church, try a movie such as Babette's Feast or Chocolat -- you'll see that appreciating even a simple piece of chocolate clearly has transformational possibilities.

If eating is a creative job, then reading certainly is. There's even a school of thought that argues that training the imagination with creative play is just as important for preparing children to read as is learning the alphabet or mastering phonics. Another school of thought suggests the meaning of a text depends on the perspective of the person reading it: in other words, it takes a reader to complete a text.

Bloggers know this in their bones. It's never enough just to publish our posts: we crave our readers, we need their comments. (Feedcrack, the brilliant Luisa -- and author of the wonderful cookbook, Comfortably Yum, calls it; and you should read her post about it here.) To be a member of the blogging community means a willingness to leave a comment, to let the writer know that someone was there, someone liked their work.

Lately I've been remiss in this aspect of blogging life; I'm reading beyond my means. I love my blogging community, but it's become large enough that I can't keep up with it in any thoughtful way. It's made me long for the days before Google Reader when I could depend on writers keeping stats on their blogs and knowing their readers from their IP addresses. Even if I didn't leave a comment, the writer could see my calling card and know I'd stopped by: the post had been read.

What keeps me from commenting? Here are my top five reasons:

1) I get interrupted, or I have to leave. Happens all the time. I close up my Reader, and when I return I forget where I am in my commenting.
2) I think I've commented on something, but I haven't: I've only thought about it. This happens all the time, too.
3) The post stirs up such a response that I really need to sit down with the writer and share a pot of coffee or a bottle of wine to explain my reaction. You are all extraordinary writers; this happens a lot. If it's going to take me half a day to write a comment, chances are I'm not going to write it at all.
4) The post already has several thousand comments congratulating the writer on a wonderful piece: I really hate being late to a party.
5) Like the teacher in Kevin Henkes' wonderful book, Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse, the only thing I can think to say is "wow."

So it's lack of time that does me in; never lack of interest. For some reason, though, I can't seem to rein in my reading; like the greedy monkey of the old fable, I'm not willing to drop a single word.

While on vacation, I spent some time thinking about this problem. How could I invite comments, I wondered, if I couldn't reciprocate in kind? I considered shutting down the comment function of my blog: anybody could still read whatever I posted, but there'd be no comment link to leave anybody feeling guilty. Too draconian, I eventually decided; unfair, too, to cut people off like that: the chance to interact with other writers is one of the more appealing aspects of blogging.

Then, I remembered something I heard about several years ago, the idea that it was ok for bloggers to post whatever they liked, whenever they felt like it: they called it Blogging Without Obligation. Made sense to me. It was how I operated anyway: somedays I wrote memoir, others I wrote about food & recipes, there's haphazard fiction and bad poetry, not to mention long stretches where I depended completely on quizzes and memes. My readers put up with a lot.

So why have I been so slow to come to a similar response to commenting: Commenting When I Can? Sure seems obvious. I can still read all my blogs, maybe make more of an effort to click through and bring up your posts so those of you who still keep analytics will know I've been around, and I'll comment when I can. That's where I am, for now. And for now, that's all.