Miss Adams… and the potlatch

It is an important week, semester finals. Kids are rushing to get work turned in. Teachers are rushing to grades done and submitted. Now, this is an end to something. I hate endings. I think that beginnings are scary, middles are happy and endings are sad and depressing. And how do Italians cope with sad things like saying goodbye? We eat… actually, we feed the people we are loosing. So! Guess what I am doing this week with my classes? You bet, feeding them. Every class is having a potlatch! I just finished making a huge army size pot of meatballs. Talk about food of love people! School potlatches have a special place in my heart… let me tell you why…

I had an amazing friend when I was in high school. We met our freshman year, right after my family moved from Texas to California. We weren’t friends at first; in fact he made me cry the first time we met. He yelled at me because I was sitting in his seat. And when I say yell, picture your second day of school in a new state (lookin’ like a preppy in the hood) and an angry latino male up in your grill lookin’ like he gonna kill you. Since I was not the tenacious Miss Adams that you now know and love, I avoided him at all cost for several weeks after the incident. I even went as far as to fain illness and go home to avoid being in the same room as him. But he was a nice person, and when he was finally able to catch me, he apologized for what he had done. We were friends from that point on. But my fondest memory of this friend was our 11^th grade class potlatch.

We had made a pact him and me that we would join our school’s restaurant and so in 11^th grade we did. After a year working as cooking partners we had mastered the art of making breakfast sandwiches and burritos, cookies and other delightful Eagle’s Nest delicacies. For our final grade we were assigned to host a class potlatch. I was thrilled! I have always loved to cook, and this was an opportunity to cook what I love and not what I was assigned. I made tortilla soup. We sat at the potlatch for 2 hours eating soup and goodies and talking. And I realized what a special friend I had when I was sitting at that potlatch. There is something special about sharing something you have worked so hard on with people you care about. Sometimes there are no words to say thank you. Sometimes there are no words to tell someone how special they are to you. But food is an art form that let’s us do that.