Thanksgiving Week Column

I like to cook. To me cooking is like playing with the chemistry sets my parents bought me when I was young. They undoubtedly thought I would do the experiments in the accompanying books. The truth is, I rarely, if ever followed the instructions. I liked to try different things to see what would happen. Some results were good, some not so much. A couple were more dangerous than advisable.

Likewise, I cook the same way. Some results are delicious, some acceptable, a few disasters. Over the years I have learned not to combine some ingredients and expect a good result. I have lots of recipe books but almost never consult them. The one thing I’d like to do more of, but very rarely do, is bake bread, pastry, etc. The annoying thing is, if I don’t follow instructions when baking it’s rarely any good. I buy my bakery items instead.

Because I know my tendencies I’ve never been a mechanic, flown a plane, done brain surgery, or anything else where precise rule following is critical. I even quit skiing the day I realized my legs would no longer respond quickly to the exigencies of a headlong plunge down an expert run or side trip through the trees. As Dirty Harry once said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

I know folks who are incapable of taking on any project, any endeavor, without striving for not just excellence, but perfection. They are obsessed with doing things the Right Way. They look at folks like me with disdain as I flounder along happily making a mess of things and being absolutely delighted when they turn out well.

They are the sort of folks you want to pack parachutes but they miss a great truth. Things do not have to be done well to be worth doing. My momma had a ready aphorism for every contingency in life. One was, “Once a task is just begun, never leave it till it’s done. Be it great, or be it small, do it well, or not at all.”

Unfortunately, following such advice takes a lot of fun out of life. I’ll never write the next Great American Novel because I will never have the discipline to follow all the rules. I’ll rewrite two or three times but that’s it. I’m fortunate to have some wonderful proofreaders who point out my goofs before they’re published. Supposedly, Tolstoy rewrote War and Peace twenty-six times! That’s about 1,300 pages of rewrite each time! Maybe Tolstoy was a good guy to hang out with but I’m quite sure he wasn’t the sort of fun person I’d want at my party.

It is not necessary to be good at something. It is not necessary to want to improve. It is perfectly acceptable to do something simply because you enjoy it.

Life is messy and often difficult. We won’t ever get everything right. Maybe Thanksgiving dinner isn’t perfect but that’s okay. The point is about being thankful, not perfect.