A Love Letter To Artists

On the power of beauty in difficult times and the story of my kitchen blessing

On our last night in Sweden, Tony and I went for dinner at a small place a mile from our hotel called Bord. A sweet-faced girl with a pixie cut, a small pink mouth, and gleaming, waxy skin greeted us with a smile at the door. She took us through the small interior, which sat no more than twenty or thirty, and put us in a booth near an older couple. In the dim candlelight, we noticed they were of a fragile age. Both were mild and soft, frail and needy, like children once more.

After we settled, I ordered an apple cider and Tony got a deep, red wine, something French and old. I ordered monkfish with chard in a white, creamy wine sauce and Tony got the duck. Mine was better by far, which made me happy and fascinated with everyone nearby.

We took up conversation with the older couple beside us as we ate. The man had a white thread poking out from his inner ear, indicating a hearing aid. The woman was so small and thin, I worried that when she laughed she might shatter into pieces. When we asked how long they’d been married, they both shook with laughter. 

“Not married,” one or both said. Then she whispered to me, “His wife is dead and my husband died two years ago.” She grabbed my hand just then and I could feel how soft it was, like my grandma’s silky, cold hands. We let our hands rest together on the cushion like that, mine cupping hers gently. Neither of us let go.

“My husband died,” she said again, and her eyes were glassy and blue, opened very wide as if it had all just happened again. She reached for a  wet spot near her eye which she failed to remove with a napkin. “He died,” she said a third time. And then she began speaking in words and phrases I could not string together in a sensical way. Much like death: beyond comprehension. As she spoke she reached for me or the table. I let her take hold of me.

Lightly, I thought of paying for their meal. “What a surprise that would be,” I thought. “What a wonderful memory.” But soon they were paying for themselves and the old man had slipped into the booth next to her, helping to guide her card out of a vintage Prada coin purse. 

Her driver came in next, dressed in a beautiful tweed coat with brown leather gloves. He took them off gracefully as he replaced the old man in the booth and sat next to the old woman, waiting. He let his head dip down towards her, listening patiently to what had to have been more news on how her husband died.

Before they left, Tony took a sip straight from their bottle. He brought the mouth of it to his lips and tipped it all the way back. After he swallowed, his eyes fell as far back into his head as they could go without getting lost. The sweet old man who was not her husband laughed, and then, with a force that surprised me, clapped him heartily on the back. 

As the driver was trying to help the old woman to the door, he placed both hands gently on her tiny elbows, coaxing her to get up. Instead of following him, she stayed where she was and placed both frail, petal-soft hands around the cup of her wine glass. She brought the glass to her lips, gulping as if it were water. There was still that same little spot of wetness on her face as she tilted her head towards the ceiling, mouth glued to the rim of the glass.

When they were gone, the little waitress came back to take our plates. The name of the waitress, we found, was Emilie, and she loved to go to the northernmost parts of Sweden to find quiet. She was the sort of old soul who noticed people even as she smiled at them.

“Do you know, it’s such a sad story,” Emilie said to us after the old couple and the driver had left. “Two or three times a week, she goes out and has that wine, only that wine. It was her husband’s favorite.” We all looked at each other and then at the table.

“How much is that bottle of wine?” I asked my husband once the waitress had left, looking at the glasses, still over halfway full.

“Probably a thousand,” he said.

“A thousand?” I asked, incredulous, thinking again of the coin purse, the handsome and patient driver, and the sleek, elegant Volvo waiting outside.

“Yep.”

Silence.

“It was her husband’s favorite.”

“I know.”

“Can you imagine if we had paid?”

“Seriously awkward.”

“Seriously.”

---

Fifteen years ago when I was in college, I sold two-thirds of my possessions, swore off makeup, got my nose pierced, and committed to living as non-materialistically as possible until the atrocities of sex trafficking had ended. It seemed to me, at the ripe old age of 21, that anyone thinking about something other than slavery was selfish, wrong, and misinformed. 

Though I longed to be a writer, I was about as far from good writing as the Pope is from Protestantism. I knew the territory but my tastes were different then. I thought most great writers–Hemingway, DeLillo, Orwell–lacked the great moral underpinning of my youth, the kind that I’d grown up with as a Southern Baptist. 

My goal in studying writing was not to create beauty but to become an English teacher somewhere in a slum in India, saving women from a fate worse than death. Problems worth my time—i.e. the ones that were as remote from my own as humanly possible—were always out there, far from the droll suburban life of my childhood.

The beauty of that old, lonely woman, clinging to her thousand-dollar glass of wine, would have been wasted on that younger version of me. The money could have gone to the poor, I would have moralized, to the children coming off brothels, starvation, and forced labor! And no one could have convinced me otherwise. My pride was so omnipresent it was invisible to me. Make no mistake, if ego could take up geographical space, mine would have consumed oceans. 

From what I’ve heard, there is more modern-day slavery than ever existed at the height of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. I know, in detail I can’t forget, the pain of the Uyghur people wasting away in concentration camps in China. I’m familiar with the trafficking of women and children all over our U.S. borders. The chaos from the forever wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Israel, Palestine, and Ukraine is never-ending and always something I can’t seem to put out of my mind for long. And if I do happen to forget, there’s always North Korea in the news, or the skyrocketing rates of American men committing suicide. 

While I do not buy thousand-dollar bottles of wine every night (maybe one day!), I spend a small fortune on food every week. We keep a small but lovely home. I have a Celine bag which is the pride of my life, and I live in Los Angeles, arguably the most financially wasteful place to live outside of New York or London. If ever there was a time to be a social justice warrior, it would be now. Still, I prefer to spend most of my days writing about home and inviting people to come to the banquet at my table.

---

Seven years ago, my husband and I saw a movie called Babette’s Feast. In truth, we started it once, found it dull, and turned the T.V. to something different, probably an action movie or Masterchef. We found our way back to it sometime later when we were finally grown enough to “get it.”

The movie features a small Dutch town, home to a devoted, austere sect of Christianity. The community was started by one man and carried on by his two daughters after his death. In the film, the two sisters are visited by a French chef named Babette who, fleeing the French Revolution, seeks safe harbor in their homes in exchange for service as a cook and maid. 

The three women get along awkwardly at first; Babette is confounded by the complete lack of pleasure in the sisters’ lives and the sisters are equally confounded by Babette’s ability to turn even bread and water into something delicious. When Babette learns that she has come into a good bit of money via the French lottery system, she decides to throw a feast to thank the sisters for welcoming her in when she needed it most. Everyone in town is invited, even the most curmudgeonly peasants.

The small group of Christians goes to the feast hoping to resist the temptation to love the food of Babette, who they now believe is influenced by sorcery. But the lure of the food and the drink is too strong. The group is enraptured, both with the food and each other. The night ends in the forgiveness of old faults and the best speech on grace I’ve ever heard in my life.

The next day, in the aftermath of the feast, one of the sisters discovers that Babette has spent her entire earnings on this one meal. What would be at least an entire year’s worth of money, approximately a quarter of a million dollars by today’s estimate, is all gone. It has been spent on wine, turtle soup, quail, cheese, champagne, and so much more. When the sister expresses her dismay, stating that now Babette will never be able to go back to France and will always be impoverished, the French cook smiles and responds with this breathtaking statement: an artist is never poor.

---

It happens almost all the time. Someone comes into our home and bemoans the life they have as an interruption to their Real Art, as if the muse is held captive by the needs of their wife, the cries of their children, or the demands of neverending bills. Or they fumble, as we all do, with the many aches and pains the world continues to supply without measure. Our times are unique in that our enemies are not always clear, wars are truly chaotic and random, and the real disease so many are dying of is loneliness.

As a writer, I can think of a thousand different ways the story of Babette could have ended. Ways that are more practical, efficient, modern, and even humane. She could have seen her demotion to indentured servitude as an enormous comeback. We all love a good underdog story: “From Riches to Rags to Riches Again: A Memoir of the King’s Chef” could be the title of the book she wrote with her winnings. I’d read it, I’ll tell you that.

Or Babette could have used her money to make the lives of the entire village better and become something of a humanitarian. Babette’s last meal could have just been decent, still the best the village had ever known, but with a bit of money left over for her to go home, buy a new house, and start a more comfortable, independent life. That last one would have been my personal choice, I think.

Instead, she does none of these things. She embraces the life that she’s been given and does what she does best: cooks her little stockings off. She cooks as if these poor, feeble, socially awkward people are the true royalty and closes off all paths to her former way of living in the process. She refuses moderation: something every culture values, except maybe, the French. 

And here’s the key: she does not downgrade her extravagant approach toward food simply because the world around her has changed. In every sense of the word, life has humiliated Babette. But she doesn’t act like it. In fact, she cherishes what is right in front of her by cooking her absolute best. Somehow, in our souls, we know that while this is the harder choice, it is also the most beautiful.

The call to love this weary world lives inside whatever it is we do best: gardening, mothering, baking, reading, getting sober, calling that friend, going over the block of paragraphs one more time. For the old widow in Stockholm, she continued to drink as if her husband was still alongside her. For Babette, she continued to cook for kings even while peasants dined at her table. For me, I edit my manuscript even in the invisible hours and revisions of earlier drafts.

Above my little sink sits a powerful quote on grace. I call it my kitchen blessing. While I scrape rice and oatmeal off my pot and into my little dish disposal, it nods at me. As I rub, scrub, dry, and scrape until my bones ache, the work of Babette, of that old, rich widow waiting to see her beloved in paradise, is not wasted on me anymore.

“There comes a time when our eyes are opened and we come to realize that mercy is infinite. We need only await it with confidence and receive it with gratitude. Mercy imposes no conditions. And lo! Everything we have chosen has been granted to us. And everything we rejected has also been granted. Yes, we even get back what we rejected. For mercy and truth have met together, and righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another.”

—General Lorens Löwenhielm, “Babette’s Feast”

Edits by Lauren Ruef

Photography by Bethany Schrock