Life's so good you're drinking gravy!
I love Thanksgiving; it’s easily my favorite holiday. Some sainted sage once said: “Let’s celebrate thankfulness, with no religious confusion, no commercialization, and eat and eat and eat.” It’s simple gratitude to the core, a perfect design for a holiday. It’s also the High Holy Day for Slow Foodies, who scheme and cook for months. I also love Thanksgiving because it’s the only holiday dedicated to gravy. I LOVE gravy, and the slow foodista that I live with has mastered the art of broth, the heart and soul of excellent gravy.
I was talking with a client recently about how simple some pleasures are, and how rich they make us feel. It was a few days after Thanksgiving, and I was rhapsodic about the broth my sweetheart Genevieve makes, and the resulting gravy I was bathing everything in. The client challenged me to somehow work “gravy” into this upcoming article, and as we talked about it, we realized how fundamental simple pleasures are, how they are what give us “real wealth.” I said, “It’ll be all about gravy!”
It’s easy to mistake the size of one’s portfolio, the type of car one drives, or the stories we tell ourselves for wealth, but that misses the mark. Real wealth is many tangible things, but it’s also, essentially, the way we feel. The way we feel about life, about our daily experience, about what we eat, what we talk about, the music we listen to, how connected we feel to what’s good.
Clearly real wealth is not …a Mercedes, a seven-figure portfolio (even a socially responsible one!), but something subtler, closer to home, more intimate. Perhaps something that reminds us of our childhood, or our grandparents, or maybe something special that was lost and we have reclaimed. Did I mention that I really love broth and gravy? It feels deep and nourishing and special and hard to come by, though it’s not difficult to make gravy or even that hard to find. But it seems rare, like something your grandmother made often but which you don’t find easily.
I’m talking about gravy both literally and metaphorically, but there are some lovely connotations in the language, as in the phrase “It’s all gravy,” that imply a particular state of happiness. The Urban Dictionary online has a definition of gravy in this sense: “a state of complacency or happiness. Stable goodness.” I might define it as the happiness that comes from an abiding contentment with life. Not the ecstatic high one gets from winning the lottery (or early 2007 stock and real estate prices), but an enduring sense of satisfaction and well-being that persists over time. Stable goodness and abiding contentment are the core of real wealth, the ultimate in quality of life.
For me, gravy is one of the aspects of my “it’s all gravy” feeling (I’m a simple guy), but I asked some loved ones what they thought. Genevieve waxed on about food: good honey, meyer lemons in abundance, good butter, I had to cut her off there. For her it’s also about quality yarn for knitting, and, more importantly, the time to knit. My parents are retied, and love discovering new National Parks, visiting with old friends and family, and giving away a couple thousand books to the library. Back to literal gravy, they mentioned that it was a Sunday thing, you wouldn’t have it during the week. The cook would be too busy probably, but on the weekend, with some extra time you’d have a larger meal, with a roast, more food, and the cook would make gravy. Time seems to be key to the whole stable goodness theme. Time to enjoy simple pleasures is the essence of abiding contentment.
Please don’t file these thoughts in your “live like a billionaire on $5 a day” crap-file, I think I’m talking about something more subtle and profound here. Not profound in a blow-your-mind kind of way, but profound in the-key-to-the-good-life-was-right-before-our-eyes way. Right before my eyes, as in, right here on my plate. What gives you this feeling of stable goodness? What represents gravy to you? Is it literally gravy, other food, time with friends, or another source of simple contentment? How do you make time for it?
Please let me know what you think about this, I’d love to know!
