Making My Self . . . and Dinner

My Chowder, My Self

    In my memories of my mother, she is always cooking. I have come into the kitchen, her kitchen, and she’s cooking. She has a cigarette going, and she has a wary look, as if she’s expecting me to question the value of what she’s doing. She has that look because I have so often questioned the value of what she is doing. Maybe I’m remembering one specific occasion. This might be it . . .
    I had come home from high school at the end of the day, about four in the afternoon. I came through the back door, into the kitchen, and there she was, at the stove. I stopped inside the door and just looked at her, wondering how many meals she had made in her life, how many more she would make, pitying her with the superiority of seventeen, saying nothing.
    “What?” she said after a while.
    “You want some help?” I asked.
    “Sure,” she said. “You want to open those clams?”
    “Okay.”
    I ran water over a heap of clams in the colander, washing them so that sand wouldn’t slip inside when I opened them. I knew, from experience, that this operation was never entirely successful. Having learned that there was always some sand in clam chowder no matter how much effort I put into washing the clams, I put less effort into washing them than my mother would, though I put extra effort into seeming to put as much effort into washing them as she would.
    “Why do you do this?” I asked when I’d finished washing them and started opening them.
    “Do what?”
    “Spend all your time in here, cooking.”
    “This is what I do,” she said.
    “Wouldn’t you rather be doing something else?”
    “Right now?”
    “Yeah. Right now.”
    “No. Did you wash the sand off those clams?”
    “I washed them.”
    “Let’s have them. I’m ready for them.”
    “I’m not finished opening them.”
    “Well come on. I’m ready for them.”
    I picked up the pace. When I’d finished, I passed her the bowl of clams in their liquor.
    “What if you could be at a fancy restaurant in Paris, where somebody else is making the chowder? Wouldn’t you rather be served instead of cooking?”
    “Sure. That would be great. I’d like that.”
    “So you admit it. You get tired of cooking!”
    “Of course I get tired of it.”
    “But you keep doing it.”
    “If I keep at it, someday I’ll get really good at it.”
    “You’re already good at it.”
    “I mean really good at it.”
    She stood there looking at me, and then she said, “You don’t know what I mean by that, do you?”
    “No,” I said.
    “Someday,” she said, “I will make the best chowder that I’ve ever made, the best I ever could make, maybe even the best that has ever been made.”
    That seemed like such an absurd goal to set oneself that I pitied her even more than I had earlier, when I was standing inside the door.
    “Oh, Ma,” I said.
    “Don’t laugh at me,” she said. “This is what I do.”
    My contempt for my mother took many forms. Pity was one of them. I don’t pity her now. I have accepted her idea. If she were alive, I’d tell her so. I understand now that she had an elevated motive for pursuing mundane goals. I understand now that the quotidian is an element of the eternal, that small steps make a journey. My mother was out to make a transcendent chowder, and she was willing to work at it day after day, making her tiny steps toward something sublime.
    Following her example, I’m going to feed my soul with a project that fires my imagination, a project that is immense and eternal, or at least large enough to fill a lifetime. I’m taking up my mother’s project. Making a chowder is enough, I think, to allow for understanding the world and myself in it. However, to make the task a little more significant, or challenging, or worthy, I’m adding the making of a self, my self. I think that making a self will turn out to be a daily undertaking, like making the day’s dinner, but it will have a larger ultimate goal than the making of a day’s dinner, or even making the day’s dinner as well as it can be made—at least I assume that it will.
    I think that higher motives are better motives and lesser motives are baser motives, don’t you? The baser motives tend to be the ones directed toward satisfying some outside requirement: making a chowder to please a customer or making a self to please a lover, “making” a chowder from a can or making a self out of the ideas and attitudes that society sells like soap, making a chowder by sticking to a recipe or making a self to match the requirements of a calcified system of beliefs. The better motives tend to be those that are honest and individual, fully considered, and noble: making a chowder that is better than yesterday’s and making a self who will find a way to make herself better tomorrow than she was today.
    There you have my motivation, my transcendent goal, my grand conception.
    Don’t laugh at me. This is what I’m going to do.