Believe me when I tell you that I sat next to Julia Child in 2001.
It was dinner for a cause, two days before 9/11, in her backyard
at 103 Irving Street in Cambridge. Forgot my camera in the car.
Sun cracked open on our backs. Me in my aqua knit.
No lights. No cameramen. No script. Would you believe
I owned up to my sin? Those red lentil, thyme-smudged pages
on my Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It’s my therapy, I confessed.
She nodded, hummed her approval. She was warm, easy like an omelet,
me like a napkin in her lap. Her smell, apricot, pear, with a hint of ambrosia.
Sometimes I believe that amazing things happen by accident or loss.
That’s when I want to have a little cry, feeling kind of lucky with my
grandmother’s recipe for fish chowder following me around the kitchen.
Believe me when I say that inside Julia’s house I peeked in the pantry,
caught a chef riffing jazz on the bottom of copper pots. In the living room
bodies leaned against wood-paneled walls, or sunk deep in sofas, plastic
forks deep in Ragoûts de Porc. I snaked through the kitchen where someone
handed me a martini glass tipsy with Mousse au Chocolat. Believe me,
I saw those chipped blue cabinets, the old oak table where she lunched
on a baked potato every day, said she saved her appetite for dinner with Paul,
and by her banged-up gas six burner, the one that’s in the Smithsonian.
