Coming to and becoming through

In less than an hour's time, I'll begin the last of the scheduled interviews for this project. While I anticipate scheduling still more (or at least a few more) interviews over the summer and fall, today marks the end of intense eleven week stretch of interview time—time that I was fortunate enough to spend with people willing to share with me their memories of, and experiences with, baking/cooking.  

Yesterday afternoon I interviewed the 100^th interview participant in this study. [Note: To date 113 people have participated in the study but some opted to fill out the questionnaire on their own time instead of sitting for an interview.] At the end of our time together he said something along the lines of, “I hope I had something different or new to offer—and that you hadn’t already hit a saturation point of hearing a lot of sameness of/in experience.” And the really amazing thing is that with regard to hitting a saturation point, well, I have not.

I can remember many weeks, particularly at the start of a week, wondering if maybe I should have ended sooner, capped things sooner, that surely what I’d be learning or hearing this week and the next and the next would only be minor variations on things I’d already heard before. And there certainly were common themes or responses. (At the start of most of the interviews, for instance, I’d ask people to complete three sentences, offering the word or words that first come to mind: Cooking for me is _______; baking for me is ________, and food for me is _____. By far, the most common responses to the last question was either “complicated” or “life.”  For the other two questions, common responses might be “therapeutic,” “joy,” “fun,” “a way of showing love,” “not something I enjoy,” “creative,” or, especially with baking, “precision.” But then, with my 100^th interview participant, a response I’d not heard before, and one that made me laugh: “Baking for me is a television show.”)

So I was often surprised at the end of each week (and thankful, after all, that I’d not capped things earlier) to find myself often, if not always, learning (hearing?) new things—something that, in turn, helped me (and continues to help me) to complicate, recast, and ultimately reconsider what I’d learned/heard in the previous weeks of interviews.

This is surprising. . .yet then again, not at all. Definitions of (or senses of, attitudes toward, etc.) baking and/or cooking are different, people are different, and so it stands to reason that they ways one comes to and becomes through one’s baking and cooking experiences would also be markedly different. And as a researcher/listener, I was constantly changing. At the end of each interview I was different—what I knew was different and, as a result, what I could think to ask and where, specifically, I wanted to linger was different. While the interview questions themselves stayed more or less the same over time, the order in which questions (as well as follow-up questions) were asked and, with this, the way stories would unfold, where that unfolding would take us, differed a lot depending on the participant. So that there was more difference than I anticipated is surprising. Yet not.   

I struggle with what to do now—how to begin the 12^th week—since I can no longer count on the interview schedule to tell me where to be, when to be there, and, generally speaking, how to be. So much of my sabbatical was spent not having to decide how best to use my days. While there were certainly days when the very last thing my body wanted to do was to sit in front of a computer for most of the day (shout out to Aleve for helping me through most days), it was nice not having to think about what I should do with my day or what I should be doing instead with my day. For the past eleven weeks, I always felt like I was spending my time in the best and wisest way.   

on learning about (and from) other people's lives

Someone once asked me if I had a favorite yard sale/thrift store/estate sale find and I think I responded by saying that any number of favorites come to mind depending on the day, but all for very different reasons. Finding packs of old Polaroid film (and hoping against all odds that they'd still make images), is a very different kind of favorite find than the diamond ring I found in the bottom of a bag of wigs that I paid four dollar for, or paying twenty bucks for that big, old beautiful Frederick Weinberg lighted sculpture just sitting there on top of a pile of junk. And all these things represent different kinds of favorite when compared with others, more sentimental finds: The painting of the Boston Terrier Chris bought for me at a Goodwill on one of our first dates (I had named the dog in the painting Diana Tripod long before we found a real one that matched the painting), or the round blue suitcase from the 1960s that I bought as a travel suitcase for my other dog, Dorothy--a suitcase that is covered in stickers representing all the states she'd traveled to. 

But, really, my first of the favorite finds (and what I'd call my most important find to date) was found exactly nine years ago today when I paid two dollars for two boxes of old 35mm, 120, and 4x5 negatives.

Early today, I did my 64th interview for a new project focused, in part, on other people's memories and experiences with cooking and/or baking. After the interview proper ended, we talked a little bit about the ability (or privilege) to pursue (or, conversely, not to be able to pursue) projects about which one is really passionate. I've been lucky, in this respect. I loved the project that became my dissertation and, much later, my first book, and I love this new project. In all seriousness--it's what I go to bed thinking about and the first thing I think about when I wake up. And it's what I think/do for most of the day. And I'm grateful for this. I cannot imagine anything else I'd rather be thinking about, thinking with, or doing.

The box of negatives (the first of my favorite finds and what I'd consider to be my most important find to date) represented the work about which I was probably the. most. passionate. The negatives came to me (and I to them) at an in-between time--I'd just finished up my book manuscript and was in that place of not knowing what I'd do next. I remember feeling slightly panicked--what if there was nothing else I really wanted to do or say, nothing I really cared about as much as the dissertation and first book project? The thought of having to produce scholarship just to produce it made me feel sick. And scared. I remember telling myself that it was fine if I didn't find something right away, that odds were something else would come along about which I'd feel passionate, but I don't know that I really believed that.

I remember the whole of the spring and summer I spent with this collection. I remember sitting down at my scanner each day and saying aloud (to the scanner, to the negatives, and to the strangers depicted in them--most, if not all of them, deceased), "Okay, where are you taking me today? What do you want to show me about who you were? About what and who was important enough for you to save, to document in this way?"

And, of course, this purchase led to others, to so many others, many of which would serve as the basis of the scholarship (and much of that video-based): more negatives, still photos, home movies, scrapbooks, letters, travel diaries. I felt incredibly interested in what I was learning. I felt incredibly connected to (and, at times, consumed with and by) what I was making. I don't think I'd ever been (or, really, that I ever will be) as experimental, as alive with my learning or making as I was during that six or seven year stretch. And I felt especially honored to have and to know and to touch these things--to look after them, to care for them, to try to honor them, these traces strangers, the dead, had left behind. And part of me hates that I gave it up, that I changed course--and not even for a very good reason. Perhaps for the most cowardly reason of all.

But here I am now. Nine years ago today I began learning how involving it could be to learn about other people's lives via the visual-verbal traces they left behind and today I finished my 64th interview learning about other people's lives via their lived experiences with cooking and/or baking.

And this new project, like the last, came to me (and I to it) at another in-between time, or a just-in-time-time. As was the case after finishing my first book, I knew that I'd not likely continue doing what I'd been doing and was worried that I'd not find another project about which I'd feel passionate. One that I could not not imagine myself doing, something that I'd want to wake to do, that I'd want to go to sleep thinking about, one that I'd want to think about, to write (or compose) about pretty much all of the time.  

Insofar as I've spent the past six or seven years working with the dead, I can say that working with the living has a definite perk: the living often like to talk about Brussels sprouts.