Read Online Julia Child Rules by Karen Karbo - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Karen Karbo
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is where Julia and her secure-yet-easily-navigated filing system came into play. Throughout her life, Julia downplayed her role in the war, claiming to be a mere file clerk, but her high security clearance tells another story.
Y OU N EVER K NOW W HAT Y OU M IGHT F IND AT THE E ND OF AN I MPULSE
One of the great satisfactions of casting our gaze back on the whole of someone’s life is being able to see where the twists andturns led, and how events given scant attention during their unfolding paved the way for bigger things, sometimes even the biggest things in their lives.
The largest fork in Julia McWilliams’ road was her meeting Paul Child, which never would have happened had she not followed that first whim to answer FDR’s call to arms, and the second whim that led to her putting in her application to be sent to India. All along the way, and without a thought, she followed her heart. But meeting Paul, who not only changed her life but also gave her a brand-new one, was only part of the yield.
By casting her lot in with the OSS, Julia gained confidence, grew up, met the kind of people with whom she would spend the rest of her life, and also, somewhat bizarrely, learned to cope with vast amounts of important bits of information, an underappreciated and homely activity that over time exercised the muscle that, years later, would allow her to build complex recipes. It turned her into a woman who could write a massive, comprehensive, many-thousand-page cookbook that would revolutionize an entire nation’s attitudes about food, cooking, and eating.
W HEN TO H EED A W HIM
The current flavor of positive thinking, which holds that if we just assume something we desperately want is on its way as long as we “put it out there,” has never captured my imagination. Maybe it’s because I spent too many Decembers as a childfervently hoping, as a common Christmas Eve myth holds, that my dog would talk to me at midnight. Every year I’d wait for Smitty, our surly black dachshund, to open his mouth and hold forth, and every year he sat curled in his bed giving me the side eye. One year, I even curled up beside him on his little plaid bed and started conversing, hoping that maybe he just needed some reassurance; what I got was a snarl instead.
But embracing the power of the whim is a way to shake things up that nudges life into tossing something unexpected in your path. It’s employing your psychic divining rod, allowing it to lead you in a direction where something good, or at least different, is bound to enrich your life.
When I started thinking about whims in general, my first thought, unimaginatively, was the impulse buy. The random candy bar tossed in the grocery basket at the checkout counter; the cute little bracelet thrown atop the sweater at the department store register.
One friend said yes one night when she received a phone call from the Obama campaign asking whether she’d be willing to spend the five weeks leading up to the election working in rural Pennsylvania. On a whim, she said, she left her husband and kids and went.
The best time to heed a whim is when we find ourselves stuck in life, when putting one foot in front of the other is only taking us further away from where we want to go, even though we don’t know where that is. The most accomplishedwhim-follower I know is the twenty-year-old son of a friend. Last year, unhappy at college, where he was taking classes that meant nothing to him, he told his parents he was not returning for his sophomore year but was instead moving to Barcelona to live with some family friends. Barcelona was great for a month, until he met some people who sang the praises of Prague, where he went and worked in a coffee shop for a year. There, he also met a girl, whom, after a time, he followed to Seattle, where he is now working in yet another coffee shop and preparing to return to college. This young guy is of the whim-following age, although from what I can tell, most young
Y OU N EVER K NOW W HAT Y OU M IGHT F IND AT THE E ND OF AN I MPULSE
One of the great satisfactions of casting our gaze back on the whole of someone’s life is being able to see where the twists andturns led, and how events given scant attention during their unfolding paved the way for bigger things, sometimes even the biggest things in their lives.
The largest fork in Julia McWilliams’ road was her meeting Paul Child, which never would have happened had she not followed that first whim to answer FDR’s call to arms, and the second whim that led to her putting in her application to be sent to India. All along the way, and without a thought, she followed her heart. But meeting Paul, who not only changed her life but also gave her a brand-new one, was only part of the yield.
By casting her lot in with the OSS, Julia gained confidence, grew up, met the kind of people with whom she would spend the rest of her life, and also, somewhat bizarrely, learned to cope with vast amounts of important bits of information, an underappreciated and homely activity that over time exercised the muscle that, years later, would allow her to build complex recipes. It turned her into a woman who could write a massive, comprehensive, many-thousand-page cookbook that would revolutionize an entire nation’s attitudes about food, cooking, and eating.
W HEN TO H EED A W HIM
The current flavor of positive thinking, which holds that if we just assume something we desperately want is on its way as long as we “put it out there,” has never captured my imagination. Maybe it’s because I spent too many Decembers as a childfervently hoping, as a common Christmas Eve myth holds, that my dog would talk to me at midnight. Every year I’d wait for Smitty, our surly black dachshund, to open his mouth and hold forth, and every year he sat curled in his bed giving me the side eye. One year, I even curled up beside him on his little plaid bed and started conversing, hoping that maybe he just needed some reassurance; what I got was a snarl instead.
But embracing the power of the whim is a way to shake things up that nudges life into tossing something unexpected in your path. It’s employing your psychic divining rod, allowing it to lead you in a direction where something good, or at least different, is bound to enrich your life.
When I started thinking about whims in general, my first thought, unimaginatively, was the impulse buy. The random candy bar tossed in the grocery basket at the checkout counter; the cute little bracelet thrown atop the sweater at the department store register.
One friend said yes one night when she received a phone call from the Obama campaign asking whether she’d be willing to spend the five weeks leading up to the election working in rural Pennsylvania. On a whim, she said, she left her husband and kids and went.
The best time to heed a whim is when we find ourselves stuck in life, when putting one foot in front of the other is only taking us further away from where we want to go, even though we don’t know where that is. The most accomplishedwhim-follower I know is the twenty-year-old son of a friend. Last year, unhappy at college, where he was taking classes that meant nothing to him, he told his parents he was not returning for his sophomore year but was instead moving to Barcelona to live with some family friends. Barcelona was great for a month, until he met some people who sang the praises of Prague, where he went and worked in a coffee shop for a year. There, he also met a girl, whom, after a time, he followed to Seattle, where he is now working in yet another coffee shop and preparing to return to college. This young guy is of the whim-following age, although from what I can tell, most young
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