What do I have in common with Julia Child? Not the art of French cooking. I cannot follow a recipe to save my life. But Julia Child loved writing and receiving letters, and so do I. And in our love for letters, we both discovered an age-old recipe, and a recipe I can follow. A recipe for life.
Julia Child wrote her memoir, My Life in France, using the letters she'd written during her years there to illustrate how that time in her life had been. I wrote my book, Signed, Sealed, Delivered: Celebrating the Joys of Letter Writing, to illustrate all the special, unique qualities of letters that make them such a wonderful mode of communication. Neither Julia's memoir nor my book was intended to offer advice on how to live a good life but when letters are involved, the parallels start percolating. Because the qualities that define a good letter also define a good life (and for that matter, a good recipe).
I set off on a quest to define the special characteristics of letters when my oldest son set off for college and I realized I was not likely to get many letters for him. But I wanted a letter - so much. Why? Why are letters so important to me? The quest began, through history and across the collections of friends, libraries, historical archives, and digging deep into my own green trunk of saved letters. Signed, Sealed, Delivered is the story of that quest, and of what I discovered.
Once I started looking, I found letters everywhere, including in the memoir of Julia Child. Julia and her husband Paul were devoted letter writers to each other, and to their family and friends. Paul wrote long letters to his twin brother every week, and Julia wrote short but regular letters to the father she did not particularly get along with -- except via mail.
The couple created a tradition of the annual Valentine Day's letter, sent to all their friends and family. These self-produced cards are simply fabulous. I especially love the one of Julia and Paul naked in a bathtub, bubbles artfully arranged to protect privacy. The little caption above their heads, stating Wish You Were Here, is especially lovely and funny -- did they really wish all their friends could join them in the tub? Probably not -- but they allowed all friends in, via their card.
Letters create a bridge, between writer and reader, between one point in time and another. Not only do letters connect us to the people we love whom are a few hundred miles away -- they can connect us to people we love who have passed away, and whom we will never see again. Letters can connect us to people we don't know -- I never met Julia Child but I feel as if we are friends, through her letters -- and they can take us back even further, to centuries and places and people we never could have become acquainted with. But through their letters, they become very real, alive and dynamic.
In the centuries to come, anyone reading one of Paul's letters to his twin brother, quoted at length in Julia's memoir, will get a vivid sense of what is was like to live in Paris in the 20th century:
"Lipstick on my belly button and music in the air! Thaaat's Paris! What a lovely city! .... How fascinating the crowds before one's café table, how quaint and charming and hidden the little courtyards with their wells and statues. Those garlic-filled belches! Those silk-stockinged legs! Those mascara'd eyelashes! Those electric switches and toilet chains that never work! Hela! Dites-Donc! Bouillabasse!!"
In Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I celebrate the bridges built by letters. Bridges built with care and with time. Think about what it takes to write a letter. Think about, for that matter, what it takes to cook a meal. One of Julia's overriding precepts in preparing recipes -- her advice to all cooks -- is that care be taken. The care to read the instructions, assemble the right ingredients, and then follow each step to the letter: As Julia says, "a careful approach will result in a magnificent burst of flavor, a thoroughly satisfying meal, perhaps even a life-changing experience..."
This same precept applies to letter writing, and to life. We should be attendant -- faites attention, pay attention, be aware and in the moment -- of our lives. Care about what we do, work at what we do, find satisfaction in what we do.
At the end of My Life in France, Julia writes,
"good French food is an art... nothing is too much trouble if it turns out the way it should. Good results require that one take time and care. If one doesn't use the freshest ingredients or read the whole recipe before starting, and if one rushed through the cooking, the result will be an inferior taste and texture..."
Again, the same in letters, and in life. If we are rushed, the results are terrible -- scribbled and inane, burned or sour, too sweet or too gummy or too lumpy. But if we take time, even the most slender of notes or the most simple of meals or the most ordinary of moments can be exquisite, memorable, enlightening, comforting.
I am no good at following a recipe for a meal. I just can't do it, in part because I am usually doing two or three or four things at the same time that I am cooking -- and so I am not paying the necessary attention to get any but the simplest of preparations right.
But when it comes to writing a letter, I find it much easier to focus. I sit down and all my attention zeroes in on the person to whom I am writing a letter. When my son left for college, I thought what I wanted was a letter from him. But now I understand that the letters that I write to my son are what matters most of all. Because they are proof of my care and my attention and my love. A letter I write is the first step of the bridge; every letter brings me closer to him.
Care, time, bridge. Three qualities of letters. Not the only three qualities -- there are more to discover in my book, Signed, Sealed, Delivered (and more guidance on living and on writing letters). But if you start with these three qualities, taking care, spending time, and building bridges, you are well-placed to begin a wonderful journey.
In letters, in cooking, in love -- in anything that we care about, take time for, and share, we find the ingredients to a good life.