The few times now that I have clicked on over to Viv’s website, Seattle Bon Vivant, I've done so a bit wistfully, thinking, “Ah, there but for a very-near-to-mid-life crise de couer while stuck in a small-town culinary wasteland could have gone I.”
Right. Well. Not only is that wistful thinking, but highly wishful thinking.
I started off as a food blogger; just how my blog transformed itself into a sort of day-to-day electronic bildungsroman, I'm not sure. But Viv’s site always makes me wonder that if I had kept at the food thing, would I have been able to create a blog half so visually appealing, half so passionately alive, half so charmingly imbued with what we Americans think is French spirit, half so enthusiastically devoted to the good things in life?
The answer? No, not by half. I’ve never even been to France, after all; most of the world does not find Colombian or Paraguayan spirit very charming (thinking only of drug lords and fascist dictators); I only recently got a digital camera of my own, (but who wants to look at pictures of braunschweiger and lentils?); and one can’t go from slogging away in a bungalow kitchen to being a bon vivant, just by whipping up a batch of Pot-au-Feu, which, incidentally, I never did whip up.
This ‘Viv” has piqued my curiosity. If you go to her site, you’ll see that she’s very guarded with personal references and her blog has almost a near-professional, public-service sort of upbeat tone. She’s all about sharing—everything that she loves, from books to places to food to travel to movies to music to products to exhibits to restaurants to dear departed pets. It's quite amazing. And while her tone is just right for daily inspiration, I found that reading large sections in search of clues as to who she is, left me a little breathless.
Her motto could be I love therefore I am! (French?) or I consume because it’s all my culture has ever taught me to do! (American?)
Of course, to be fair, the latter statement above is more a reflection of my younger self. Viv does more than consume. She appreciates and contemplates the products of culture. She herself creates, or recreates, culinary dishes; she takes beautiful photographs; she writes; she has "clients", whatever that entails. Also in the interest of fairness, she never claims to reveal all she is. She may, in fact, only be revealing a percentage, just the things that "tickle her." What I just can’t fathom is how much time she has left to devote to the remaining percentage. Then again, my spirit is neither as abundant or as well nourished, and my imagination certainly fails me in this regard. But in this case, where imagination fails, experience should step in. From experience, I know what many bloggers know: what you reveal is never, by any means, the whole picture.
Viv does let slip this revealing tidbit about her upbringing, however:
I grew up in a family where olive oil (always from Spain) was de rigueur on our table. My mother always said the olive oil could "make or break a dish" so she was very fickle about which olive oil she used in her kitchen. She used it everyday for cooking and a little decanted portion of it always sat at the table to drizzle over most of our meals.
Hmmm. . .Viv is at least second generation bon-vivant. Affiliated with a certain cooking school in Seattle? I don’t know. What I do know is that I grew up in a family where the only mandatory things on the table were ketchup, pickles and Velveeta.
Ah, Viv--you’ve been kind enough to stop by my kitchen, and wish me well when I am sick. I’m not teasing you or criticizing you. Just wondering (longingly) what your life would be like for a little while. In the endlessly abundant and stimulating environment of a town like Seattle, I might be what I love as well. I might joyfully consume until the cows came happily home.
Or would I just feel distracted?
* * *
In my sickbed the other day, I picked up my husband’s volume of Rolling Stone Interviews and gleaned bits of wisdom from the likes of Sting and Woody Allen.
Woody Allen said people obsess over trivialities because they are afraid of the big things, like death and aging.
If he's right, this explains a lot of things to me. It explains the magazine stands at Barnes and Noble, for one thing. It explains Martha Stewart. It explains eyelid surgery. It explains obsessions with Maldon sea salt.
But aging and death aren’t the big things in life; they are only the inevitable things. Obsessing about the trivial out of fear, puts you in serious risk of failing to realize the really important things: life itself and its possibilities—for love, for creation, for any sort of authentic existence of one’s own. I don’t meant to get all Thorton Wilder-ish here. Just wondering how it is that with all the serious things on my mind (genocide, racism, fascism, feminism), my spirit finds itself yearning again for previous distractions, trivialities, amusements, and joys. The difference is this yearning seems to come from the other side of a great divide, somehow having gone from from a need to consume (because it’s all my culture has ever taught me to do) to a need to love (because I am). The impetus is to share, not hoard; it stems from acknowlegement, not fear. It accepts certain constraints of my environment, but vows to counteract them with a delight in (not resentment of) abundant life elsewhere. And I don’t think it’s an American vs. French dichotomy. I think it has to do with age, or possibly, too, with upbringing.
Second generation bon vivants may just get there a lot sooner than the rest of us.
2:13:41 PM 
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