Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Rev. Meg Barnhouse
August 7, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
My attempts at cooking and baking have taught me some things. More recently, Kiya and I spent three weeks in Mexico learning Spanish, which has taught me even more.
One of the things I do as a writer is to try to tell the truth as much as I can, at least to myself. There is one trick I use to get to underlying truth, and I’m going to use it this morning so you can see how it works. Then you can decide whether you might want to use it too. I write a sentence or so, and then I write “What I really mean to say is …. ” And wait to see what happens.
With the first part of my vacation, as those of you who are on Facebook with me will know, I started experimenting with cooking and baking. I learned something about how I like to do things. What I really mean to say is, I cooked every meal when my boys were growing up. What I really mean to say is I grilled every meal. The grill was in the carport, so rain or shine, summer or winter, I grilled chicken breasts or pork chops, steaks, hamburgers, ears of corn, onions, peppers and peaches. There is something satisfying about cooking over an open flame, and there is very little measuring involved. Measuring seems like too much when you have a job and two small children.
I was no good at cooking. What I really mean to say is that I had decided when I was in my teens that I was bad at it. I used to experiment all the time. I made my own yoghurt, I made bread, I put salads together with apples and sunflower seeds. The grownups mocked me. It was the early 70’s, when salad was mostly iceberg lettuce and thousand island dressing.
I got confident. What I really mean to say is that I got confident enough to make a mistake, which was trying to make an applesauce omelet. I know. I should have known it would be awful, and lo, it was. Awful. I left the kitchen. What I really mean to say is I left the kitchen to my mother and my sister, who were a pair, and went to do math and play chess with my dad, because that was the division of parents decided upon in the family. It was also the early 70’s, which was a time when Feminism was trying to find itself again, and young women were told not to learn to type, because if you could type, that’s what you would be doing for the rest of your career, and we were somehow shown that, in order to move beyond stereotyped femaleness we should scorn all parts of the stereotype, which included cooking, make-up, perfume, giggling, or whatever was associated in the culture with the “Mad Men” type of womanhood. It has taken the new generation of young women who can wear aprons, have tattoos, struggle with work and family balance, and still ask why struggling with work and family balance is more of an issue for them than for working men their age.
In sharing my adventures on FB, I got help. “Freeze the flour before you make the pie dough” was a good one, as everything must be very cool for it to work well. One person offered to come over and bake for me. That is not help, that is just — something else. Sharing your knowledge with someone, (if they are mature enough to be open to input, which I, of course, am) can be helpful. A friend in Richmond sent an excellent set of measuring spoons, and someone in Austin gave me an extra Cuisinart she had, which fulfilled a wish I’d thought was out of reach. Another person kindly told me I should not start with the hard things, but start with the basics. That doesn’t work for me. What I really mean to say is I learn best by being thrown into the deep end. Plus, I don’t really want to learn to cook. I’m a first born Virgo, which means I just want to cook. See the difference?
Fortunately, the deep end is where I landed at the Spanish Immersion school in San Miguel De Allende. We had to find a gay-friendly school, which is something many people don’t have to consider. There are UUs in San Miguel, and they helped us with a house to rent and good information about where to buy meat and vegetables, wifi, electricity, water and cell phones. The school was about fifteen minutes taxi ride through hair-raisingly crowded and narrow cobblestone streets. The first day I just showed driver the address on the screen of my phone. That’s how much Spanish I had. The school had said, by email, that we could start any Monday. Monday morning, we were shown into a class of four people. They had already been going two weeks. They were on p. 52 of a 60 page work book. Immersion means that Spanish is taught in Spanish, but I speak moderately good French, so I found I could understand nearly everything. 80 percent of the words used in the class were very close to the French, so I could follow along. I was happy figuring it out. That part of my brain that is good at remembering names lit up, and I remembered the vocabulary words well. Grammar, well, not so much. And speaking. OY. That is the hard part. Still, we had wide-ranging conversations about US and Mexican politics, about religion and the revolution, about Chinese herbal medicine. The teachers were professionally patient with my struggles to say things I wanted to say. We had been practicing with Duolingo, an app on the phone that teaches any language you like, and I’d learned to say “Los elefantes no beben leche” (The elephants don’t drink milk), and “Quiero mas ulvas en my pastil.” (I want more grapes in my cake,) but none of those sentences was of much use with taxi drivers or in class. Everything in class was in present tense, which keeps communication fairly simple, and it’s a good spiritual exercise. I enjoyed practicing with taxi drivers and waitresses. They were also professionally patient with me, and once in a while, with a smile, they would correct my words. I was telling one that, at the pool where we were going, ‘voy a sentarse en la sambra,” (that I was going to sit in the shade.) “A la sombra,” he kindly corrected. Then, “what is that in English?” he asked. “The shade,” I said. He practiced that word a few times. When he came back to pick us up, he said “That word again? Shike?”
“Shade,” I said, and felt much better getting one sound right in my words but not all of them. The words for Thursday and egg sound the same, and dog and but sound the same, etc. It’s comical for the Spanish speakers to hear me talk, which I’m glad about. I’m still very timid about speaking, because I hate to be a beginner, What I really mean to say is I think I should be able to do everything well right away, What I really mean to say is being a learner is fine for other people, but I’m very uncomfortable in that role, What I really mean to say is …. What? It takes courage to make mistakes. It takes courage to be a learner. Why does it take courage? It shouldn’t. What I really mean to say is everyone should know that when you are learning new things you are, by definition, not going to be good at them right away. What I really mean to say is I’m just like everyone else, and it makes me mad that I have to keep reminding myself of that. Life reminds me often enough.
I learn over and over that it’s ok to be a learner, that mistakes are inevitable if you want to grow, that some people learn best when they are over their head, that the kind of help that equips the person who is adventuring is better than the kind of help that takes the adventure away. What I really mean to say is I’m glad to be back sharing life with you, and this is going to be a learning year.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
