I’ve received a lot of good gifts in my life.

Just the other day, I received a handmade collage from my friend, Kaitlin. I love it because she made it, but I also love it because it features a very dapper looking Obama, circa 1970s. There’s some hope for you.

When I turned 21, a friend took me to dinner and presented me with 21 gifts, each carefully selected to reflect my interests: a hardback atlas that I still have today was the stand out among them all.

Books: so many. A bilingual edition of Neruda from my mentor. Joseph Campbell from my favorite high school teacher and dear friend.

A painting from a client, another from a friend, and still another from Francisco.

And these are just (some of the) material gifts… there are thousands upon thousands of other gifts: moments, words, shared experiences.

Some of the gifts have gotten lost–despite all my care–in my many moves over the past 10 years. But I’ve managed to hang on to most of them, including The Joy of Cooking, a Christmas gift from my godparents 11 years ago. “Hopefully you will have your own home in the near future and will enjoy cooking,” my godmother wrote on the first page.

Fortunately, both of her hopes have been fulfilled.

While I’m not the chef in this family, I pulled Joy off the shelf tonight, in search of a corn chowder recipe. I thumbed through the 1000+ page book for a few minutes, reading the notes, stains, and clippings I’ve added to the text over the years:

Next to Chocolate Mousse: “very easy; delicious.”

A check mark next to Classic Meatloaf, Chicken Breasts Baked in Foil with Sun-dried Tomatoes and Olives, and Gazpacho, and a check with two plus signs next to Pork Tenderloin Scaloppine with Citrus Balsamic Sauce, clearly a dish I made to impress an ex.

Other recipes are circled—Red Onion Marmalade, Indonesian Ginger Sambal, Roasted Red Pepper Soup–things I meant to make but never have.

I was amused to see that I’d read the cookbook like a novel, underlining phrases I liked.

The pages, especially in Soups and Pastries, are dotted with tomato seeds, specks of balsamic vinegar, smatterings of dry dough, reminding me of the times when I was afraid to cook without the structure and comfort of a recipe.

And I started to think about gifts–how they change, as we do, over the years. How we lose touch with the givers for all kinds of reasons, or how the relationship deepens. The gifts eventually take on a life of their own, reflecting who we were at a particular moment in time, and showing us how far we’ve come… as well as how hungry we still are.

Photo: michekerr (Flickr creative commons)