I Was Horribly Self-conscious; I Wanted Everybody

There Are May Of Us Who Cannot But Feel Dismal About The Future Of Various Cultures. Often It Is Hard Not To Agree That We Are Becoming Culinary Nitwits, Dependent Upon Fast Foods And Mass Kitchens And Megavitamins For Our Basically Rotten Nourishment.

In Spite Of My Conviction That A Group Of Deliberately Assembled Relatives Can Be One Of The Dullest, If Not Most Dangerous, Gatherings In The World, I Am Smugly Foolhardly Enough To Have Invited All My Available Family, More Than Once, To Dine With Me.

I Sat In The Gradually Chilling Room, Thinking Of My Whole Past The Way A Drowning Man Is Supposed To, And It Seemed Part Of The Present, Part Of The Gray Cold And The Beggar Woman Without A Face And The Moulting Birds Frozen To Their Own Filth In The Orangerie. I Know Now I Was In The Throes Of Some Small Glandular Crisis, A Sublimated Bilious Attack, A Flick From The Whip Of Melancholia, But Then It Was Terrifying...nameless...

Cooks Must Feed Their Egos As Well As Their Customers.

There Is No Chiropractic Treatment, No Yoga Exercise, No Hour Of Meditation In A Music-throbbing Chapel, That Will Leave You Emptier Of Bad Thoughts Than This Homely Ceremony Of Making Bread.