It was on this day ...

Interesting tidbit from the Writers' Almanac:

It was on this day in 1877 that Thomas Edison announced that he had invented a new device for recording and playing back sound, which he called the phonograph. His hope was that it would replace stenographers in business offices, and that it would allow people to preserve the voices of family members who had died. He wrote, "It will annihilate time and space, and bottle up for posterity the mere utterance of man."

But most people who saw the early demonstrations of the phonograph found it spooky, as though it were playing back the voice of a ghost. Edison demonstrated it for the editors of Scientific American magazine, and the magazine later wrote, "No matter how familiar a person may be with the modern machinery, or how clear in his mind the principles underlying this strange device may be. It is impossible to listen to this mechanical speech without experiencing the idea that his senses are deceiving him."

For the first 10 years or so, most people remained uneasy with the phonograph. In order to help American customers feel more comfortable with the idea of playing back sound, the Columbia Phonograph Company commissioned a recording of marching music by John Philip Sousa's U.S. Marine Band. The idea was that Americans couldn't be spooked out by patriotic music, and those recordings became some of the first successful musical recordings ever sold.

But John Philip Sousa did not like the phonograph. He said, "The time is coming when no one will be ready to submit himself to the ennobling discipline of learning music. Everyone will have their ready made or ready pirated music in their cupboards."

Sousa was right. In 1900, most American homes had at least one musical instrument, and instead of buying records, people bought sheet music. But by the 1950s, almost all of the music being made in this country was being made by professional musicians, and few families gathered around pianos any more. Recording devices preserved the American folk music that by then had begun to die out, but it might never have died out at all if it hadn't been for recording devices.

I do have some sympathy for Sousa's point of view, much as I love recorded music. I took piano for three years, but abandoned it for ballet (which was eventually abandoned, too.) I really wish I could play Gaelic fiddle, and if my household ever gets enough money, I think I would like to take lessons. I do wish I could play a musical instrument. My mother, as I have mentioned before, has played cello for over 65 years.

Life has changed so much, but I think of how nice it would have been to have the sort of family evening gathered around music you saw in Jane Austen's time--there are scenes in the movies Emma and Sense and Sensibility depicting this. Ah well, I guess I will have to make do with the Minn-stf music circles. Which, come to think of it, is hardly "making due" at all, but instead a great pleasure.

More re cooking for ingrates: Likes, Dislikes, and Power Struggles

cakmpls and mizzlaurajean and I got into a series of comments on my earlier post about Cooking for Ingrates, and I thought I'd marshall my thoughts in a new post.

Specifically, mizzlaurajean responded to my comment "I hate cooking for my ungrateful family" by asking, quite reasonably, "Then why do it?" I replied:

Because I love cooking (or I would if anyone would appreciate it). Because Rob, comparatively is a much worse cook than me, and if it were up to him, they would eat very badly indeed. Because these are the prime years for them to lay down the calcium in their bones that they will need when they are old to prevent hip fractures. Because Delia is rather underweight and I'm worried about her growing properly. Because if they don't get breakfast, they do badly in school. Because when Delia becomes hypoglycemic her mood becomes so monstrous that the whole family suffers for it. Because if no one tries to teach them how to eat right, how will they learn about how to read labels, and what foods have the vitamins they need, and why they should eat multigrains and avoid trans fats?

Because I'm genetically programmed to look after them and nurture them and care for them.

Because I love them, and preparing food for them is a way of showing love. Which, I suppose, is why it bothers me so much when they refuse it.

Rob added that there's another practical reason: according to household rules, if I cook, I don't have to do the dishes.

cakmpls commented:

Sure, we want to do right by our kids, but there's a limit. Having now lived though two cycles of family (that is, the one in which I was the child and the one in which I was the parent), I am absolutely convinced that food is an area where families have huge control issues, and that's 100% bad. In the long run, I think that people have far worse problems with the fallout/aftermath of the control struggle than with any bad diet whatsoever.

The fact that preparing food is a way you show love is possibly a large part of the problem here. I bet that you are far more "invested" in food that the rest of them. When they refuse your food, they are not refusing your love; to them, food is just food, and they like it or they don't.

This is something I've actually given a lot of thought over the years during all the angst about food in our family. I have consciously told myself repeatedly, "Remember that if they reject the food, they are not rejecting you. Don't take it personally." I know this, but it still hurts when they do refuse what I make. So what is going on? Well, what you know consciously and what you experience emotionally are two different things.

I think, upon further thought, that there is also one other aspect here: food is just such a huge source of pleasure in my life. I love tastes and textures, and I love to share what gives me pleasure. Haven't you ever experienced this? You love a book, or a movie, and you recommend it to someone else, and you're so thrilled when they respond, "Wow, I'm so glad you told me about it. Now I love it, too!" I had an argument with my sister Cindy years ago that really sticks in my memory. I was asking her opinions about various films, and she was extremely disparaging about just about any one I praised. At one point of the conversation, she said to me in total seriousness: "I don't like the kind of films you like, Peg. I like good movies." Upon thinking it over, I realized that our sibling relationship growing up was rather fraught: perhaps because we were so close in age we often battled each other. In the course of the following conversation I challenged us both to step outside of the pattern we seemed to have unconsciously fallen into, to define ourselves in opposition to each other: if you like this, that means that I can't. It was a sort of a power struggle between us that until that day I hadn't even realized was going on. "When I find something I like," I told her, "I really want to share it with people I love, like you. When I see you enjoying something I like, that doubles my own pleasure. When you refuse to like it on the grounds that I like it, that's immensely frustrating to me."

I can imagine cakmpls replying with something she has often said in comments before: don't apply the Golden Rule according to what you want. It should be applied according to what the other person wants. If Fiona gets pleasure in white pasta sprinkled with parmesan cheese, shouldn't that be enough for me, as long as I make sure she gets a vitamin pill, too? Well, I also happen to like white pasta sprinkled with parmesan cheese, personally. But I also like cold melon soup, and spicy Thai food, and baked halibut topped with fresh mango salsa.

It's as if I'm taking the kids through an art museum, and they refuse to look at any painting that has any but three specific colors in it: black, beige and white. "But what about Picasso?" I cry. "What about Monet, what about El Greco, what about Rembrandt? You're missing so much!" It doesn't really convince me to tell me that they'll get all they need to know about art by looking only at line drawings and ink woodcuts. I'm still sad about what they're missing, even if they are perfectly happy. Not just because of the power struggle, but because it feels so lonely when I have no one with whom to share my enthusiasm about Picasso and Monet and El Greco and Rembrandt. Not to mention how much it cost me to get into the damn museum in the first place.

(Oh: and I should have said on the last entry: thank you so much, but I'm not looking for advice. These food entries seem to attract more advice than any other type of entry I write. Unless they're the entries about housekeeping. But I'm simply thinking out loud.)

(And now I'm off to go eat leftover taco pie and winter squash for lunch.)