Legacies

In the fall of 1982 I spent a semester in London. I lived a few steps from the Warwick Ave, Underground Station in the northern part of the city near Regent’s Park. I lived in a large house with other students from my college and from another college, Drew University located in New Jersey. One day when I was in the communal kitchen making tomato sauce for pasta, one of the Drew students, Mary (last name not remembered) showed me how to easily remove the skin from a clove of garlic by lightly smashing it with the back of a spoon. I still peel garlic this way (though I often use my knife handle instead of a spoon) and every time I do it, I think of Mary and of London. It is not something I do consciously, it just happens. Mary and I were not really friends, we never spent much together that I can recall. I have no idea where she might be now and I can’t imagine that she remembers me at all much less showing me how to peel garlic. 

When I was a kid we we lived in a house in Baltimore that had a “secret” doorway in the kitchen leading to a narrow wooden staircase that led to a room we called the library because it was lined with bookshelves. From there a narrow hallway connected to a the smallest bedroom in the house which had its own tiny bathroom attached. In earlier times the bedroom, bathroom, and library (which had probably been a storage room of some kind, it was freezing cold in the winter) would have been occupied by a live-in maid who would have been able to slip down those steps early in the morning to get breakfast going without disturbing the still sleeping family.

We never had a maid live-in or otherwise. The extra bedroom was used as my father’s den (the precursor to a man cave) and the extra bathroom was his photography dark room. On the back of the door to the secret kitchen stairs hung a storage thing with pocket where, for some reason, we stored shoeshine polishes and brushes. One time when I was 9 or 10 years old my Grandpa Alfred was visiting and he taught me how to shine my shoes back at those kitchen stairs. To this day whenever I shine my shoes, I think of my grandfather leaning over the library steps showing me how to brush the newly polished shoes to a lustrous shine. 

Around twenty years ago, my wife and I traveled to New York for the weekend to see master blade smith Bob Kramer talk about knives and sharpening in a Sur La Table kitchen store. I am crazy about Kramer’s knives. His handmade knives from his shop in Seattle cost thousands of dollars and you have to participate in a lottery just to have the chance to buy one. I will never own one of his handmade knives but I do have several of his licensed designs manufactured by Zwilling to his specifications. They are the closest I’ll get to a real Kramer Knife but they are my favorites notwithstanding. Anyway, after his presentation, I got to speak with him for a few minutes and he showed me his method for honing a blade on a steel that I use to this day. Whenever I hone my knife on the steel (nearly every time I cook) I think of Bob Kramer and how he personally showed me to do it.

There are countless other people from different eras of my life that float through my mind as I make my way through the days and weeks performing a skill that they taught me or just remembering how they were there in the right place at the right time and made my life better with their mindful presence.

We all wonder what our legacy will be. Many of us have worked at jobs or in organizations our whole lives to change things for the better and then wonder if we made a difference. Yet it may be that our most lasting impact may be in the moments we stopped and helped someone with a kind word, a teaching, or a smile. Maybe that person will forever associate you with a place, with a skill they learned, with the kindness you showed.

You’ll probably never know exactly what your legacy is. But you can be sure that you’ll leave one.

The world’s a narrow bridge; fear nothing.