The Cassoulet Saved Their Marriage… The Melting Pot Helped Ours

Today is the publication day for The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage, an anthology of essays about marriage and family edited by Caroline Grant (of Literary Mama fame) and Lisa Catherine Harper (writer and writing teacher extraordinaire, author of A Double Life). This anthology includes a shorter version of my essay, “Still Life on the Half-Shell,” published in Gastronomica several years ago. Whilst cavorting on Facebook and Twitter with the editors and other writers, I suddenly remembered the symbol of my enduring love for Sandy: bad fondue.

Part of the fun of being anthologized is reading the takes on a topic by other writers, and social media amplifies that by creating a loose “anthology tribe” where contributors become, if not life-long bosom buddies, at least riders on the same train.Â Deborah Copakah Kogan, co-author of the title essay, posted on Facebook today, “My husband,Â Paul KoganÂ and I wrote the title essay, about both our annual cassoulet fete and about having been asked to write an essay extolling our allegedly saved marriage while we were busy battling it out in couples therapy.”

I was touched by her transparency, but what Deborah surfaced in me was not the occasional relationship strife (which happens whenever Sandy does not recognize that I am right; I don’t know why she’s so stubborn that way), but the long slow twisted complication that was our life in Florida. We have now been back longer than we were there, and I look forward to the day in 2014 when we will have been in California this time around for longer than I have lived anywhere else in my adult life.

At home, in the kitchen, among our ceremonial glassware (which includes a small shot glass I once stole from my father ‘s glassware because I loved its design so much, and we now call it the Michael Schneider Glass), are two cheap champagne glasses, emblazoned with the logo of the fondue chain The Melting Pot, that represent how much we were in the struggle together. These two glasses areÂ souvenirsÂ for meals that I won’t recap, except to say that we girded our loins in tandem, then afterwards put on torn sweatclothes and stared at each other and laughed.

[INFOMERCIAL ALERT]Â I haven’t written about The Melting Pot, and may never, but several similarly resonant experiences are included in”Still Life on the Half Shell,” and you would get to experience these moments if you would a) buy the book for yourself, b) buy the book for your library, or c) recommend your library buy the book. (Or read the extended-play version in that issue ofÂ Gastronomica.)

That doesn’t mean I have fully evolved to the point where I have resolved my issues with The Melting Pot. Christine Lind Hage, a friend and someone I dearly look up to and love to spend time with, made the mistake of asking if I could meet her at The Melting Pot several ALA conferences ago. “NO!” I shouted. “NO! I DO NOT WANT TO GO TO THE MELTING POT!” Â Christine replied very carefully, “Um… ok… no Melting Pot…”

And of course it had nothing to do with overpriced mediocre fondue (a dish I can usually do without in most circumstances), or even with the Melting Pot serving as a Â metonym for the sorry state of restaurant dining in the South, but with a ton of stuff that was what we carried on our backs during that era, and I don’t mean just the experience of being somewhere that isn’t a great fit, but all the baggage and stress and sturm und drang, that huge bloated sack of regret, self-examination, 50-50 hind-sight, financial anxiety, forward-facing confusion, and at times real fear. It’s easy to look back and say everything worked out for the best–but when you’re in the situation, you don’t have that forward vista.

(And yet I met some of my all-time very favorite people in Tallahassee, people who were kind and good and supportive and full of hope and acceptance and fun and wisdom.)

The day we started on our journey back to California — largely symbolic for Sandy, who would return to pack the house and meet me several months later, but what’s wrong with symbolism? — it took us close to an hour to get past the city borders. We kept checking the contents of the car trunk, our purses, the glove box, the back seat… did we have this, and did we have that? I would drive perhaps a mile, and then one of us would ask to pull over and we would begin rummaging again. There we were, that huge soggy sack of experience entwined around our wheels.

Then I started the car and we found ourselves rolling past The Melting Pot. We exchanged glances. We kept going. We were quiet. The next time we stopped we were in another state.