If I Am From The Connecticut River Valley Of Myself

I am lucky. If I am from anywhere I am from the Connecticut River valley of Massachusetts. It is where my parents live choose to make a lives. It is a fine place where many people choose to make a life. It is where I return to, broken hearted when relationships don’t work out, or exhausted when jobs end. I am here now for a mix of these reasons. I am just a little person learning how to live.
I figured out I liked food before I became an adult. A cook didn’t show up for his shift at a bar I worked at. I was just a dishwasher, but the owner had me get on the line to send out plates of food. Early on it was clear I was barely capable. I ate too many of the expensive ingredients, food took too long and portions too generous. Eventually, as often
I didn’t take it seriously. I only tolerated work, and was only tolerated as sufficiently capable. Work was a way for me to move around the country, get weed, beer, cigarette money and a couch at a friend’s apartment. I wasn’t motivated by what I saw peers and elders striving towards. Security, family and the means to get them seemed banal goals. I had no real interests, but was blinded to the banality of my own life.
The means of avoidance I found most enjoyable was making food for friends; breaking bread I made at my bakery job over a French onion soup and game of gin rummy. Food, drink and laughter were my crutch. Dancing with a girl, the thrill of wooing her, sex, heartbreak motivated me, but left me wanting more. At risk of being glib, these were appropriate focuses for my age, time and place. Now I wonder why I squandered that time, a finite resource, on triviality. Food food, sex, and drink were not giving me meaning. They just formed a buttress against
My interest in food and work had evolved in this chrysalis of desperation. It took three months of walking farm to farm with a folder of resumes. It took me getting rejected out of hand for weeks before I understood that I didn’t just want a job, but that I wanted to work. It took miles of walking and mumbling, “I want to learn to farm,” to understand why I wanted to farm. I wanted to know where food came from. Certainly it wasn’t the back of a truck. I wanted to know where did it go once we were done with it. Did our waste get pumped out to sea or on to