Would You Like a Warm Mushroom Salad on Toast Slathered with Brie?
We have an easy recipe! Plus a simple, delicious dish celebrating autumn apples and FIVE years of the Department of Salad.
BIRTHDAYS, HOLIDAYS, AND OTHER ANNIVERSARY celebrations can be nice, I suppose—especially when you’re a kid. Or, when you’re an adult, if you’re really, really drunk. But I feel like we might be overdoing the commemoration thing at this point in time.
The anniversary of when I began feeling truly uncomfortable with this human habit was some time back in 2010, when I first heard about gender-reveal parties and immediately worried that they would result in gender-reveal-anniversary parties that I’d be in danger of getting invited to.
I’m not a monster. I get just as awed and reverential as anyone else with a heart hanging in their rib cage by those steadfast couples who have stayed married for 60 years and haven’t murdered one another, or people who remain happy, loyal employees at the same company their entire careers, or anyone who celebrates any length of sobriety even if it’s just 10 minutes, frankly.
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And I’ll absolutely show up if you happen to host a big annual cocktail party marking the Moon Landing or the fall of the Berlin Wall. If you throw a yearly shindig commemorating the Magna Carta, or Armistice Day, or Earth Day, or the beginning of the Enlightenment back around 1685? I’m totally there, with a bouquet of peonies and a big Cobb salad.
Otherwise, I’d say I’m probably one of those people whose default response to most anniversary event invites, at least in my mind, is: I’d prefer not to.
I don’t mean to be antisocial or cynical. I see my thinking as more sociological-anthropological. Anniversary celebrations, which are often revered on a sliding scale of sacredness, are man-made constructs in the same way that the construct they grew out of is.
I’m talking about the system known as time (or at least timekeeping, that human invention meant to keep chaos at bay and assure our survival). Today, even though we’ve figured out how to endure the seasons and the setting of the sun, we pay attention to this tidy little grid we’ve imposed on eternity because we can’t bear the idea of a formless existence—and because we fear death. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m glad we’re not dead!
But I sometimes think we’d all be better off if we could find a way to release ourselves from the prison of the calendar and the clock, or at least return to a more primordial kind of existence, in the way Thoreau, Thomas Merton, and Heidegger seemed to be advocating for.
At the very least, we’d all spend a lot less money on presents and expensive bottles of wine.
But even more recently, I’ve been noticing that we don’t seem to learn a damn thing from all these anniversaries and remembrances and commemorations on our calendars. Do they help us take stock of what fools we were before we saw the light of the events we now venerate? Every year, for example, America pulls out all the stops on the 4th of July, but lately it sure feels like a lot of us have paid zero attention to that holiday’s meaning.
And yet for all my philosophical meanderings on the topic, I’m just another sentimental sap. Because this week I’m quietly celebrating my own anniversary. It’s been five year since I became the sole proprietor (with the help of my imaginary boys in the lab) of the Department of Salad, which was also born out of a certain amount of strife, albeit on a much more personal level and a much much much much much much much much much smaller scale than America’s revolutionary war and our declaration of independence from King George’s (or any king’s) rule.
And even though I posted about it on Substack Notes, I can’t help mentioning it here. If you’d like a little history of how I got here, here’s that note:
Someone commented that my “genius” was that I got in on the ground floor at Substack. Which may be true. But it made me think about how often we confuse timing with persistence, or attribute someone’s devotion to a fluke. Five years later, I’m still here—and I still love doing this, very much. I owe that to all of you. So: Thank you.
