And as we cooked together, he became a little less worried and a little more confident about living in the woods. But me, I became downright messianic. It had occurred to me, as we messed around between stove and countertop, that I had discovered the secret of life—or at least the secret of parenthood. You are going to become an adult, I wanted to say. Not in any two-week bonding experience, though that may have some value, but over the next few years, you are going to become a grown-up. And what does it mean to be a grown-up? It means being able to take care of yourself. You have to be able to support yourself, to provide the basic necessities of life, like food and shelter. You have to be able to scramble your own eggs in the morning, sew on the button that just fell off, create for yourself the kind of home in which you want to live.
That’s it. Pure and simple. If you can’t do those things, you aren’t a grown-up, and if you can, you’re there.
I had never known that was my message. In fact, I had never known I had a message at all. Orlando is my oldest child, and it is over his poor defenseless head that I generally lob my maternal trial balloons. At his every age and stage, the surprises of parenthood have emerged from the great multicolored cloud of human experience to bite me in the leg. You want your child to know who he is. You want him to turn out to be someone worth knowing. You want him to have tastes and opinions, and to know what they are—and, of course, deep down, you want him to have tastes and opinions you understand. But mostly you want him, as my grandmother used to say, to be a person. Your job is to help him along.
Cooking together consolidated all this for me. Because cooking is about understanding what you want, what you crave, what moves you deeply, and then having the skill to call that something forth from the raw ingredients. Cooking is knowing who you are and then doing something practical—and delicious—with that knowledge.
So off Orlando went into the woods. He cooked macaroni and cheese, chicken and vegetable stir-fries, burgers. He made many grilled tomato and cheese sandwiches over the open fire, and he also got a little bit fancy, grilling garlic bread to go with that doctored tomato sauce. His squad ate well, and he didn’t have to dig latrines or chop wood—or at least no more than his minimum share.
And, of course, he did lots of other things. He bathed in the icy lake and climbed the high ropes. He volunteered to “solo,” to spend a night alone in the woods in his sleeping bag, during which time he happily read a 700-page fantasy novel by flashlight, feeling that he had finally achieved a certain nirvana, able to read blearily into the dawn without a parent checking for light under the door and giving lectures about school tomorrow and needing to be well rested.
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