Throwing out Gourmet

When I moved my things to Europe in the late 1980s, I moved a stack of Gourmet magazines from 1985 to 1989. For years the magazine made lunchtime reading or rather rereading when I ate alone. Not only did they conjure up memories of my mother reading her Gourmet with lunch, but of my daughter bringing up the mail and debating throwing the magazine away to prevent me from whipping up some concoction that I had discovered between its pages.

Over the years I realized that many of the dreamed-off European destinations featured in the magazine I had visited and they were no longer exotic but ordinary.

Then in the last year, the pile sat there untouched. I didn’t try out any recipes. I knew them almost by heart.

So with my spring house cleaning they were consigned to the trash without the ceremony that they probably deserved.

When I was cleaning out my mother’s house after she died, I came across decades of Gourmets. In my goal of making it possible for my daughter to rid herself of all my personal property within a morning (or less), she will not be bothered by these memories of either my reading them, cooking from them, or her own desire to rid herself of them. However, I have no desire to make this clean out necessary for a long, long time.