The Dream Materialized

Mid-September 2015. I’m sitting in Pearson Airport enjoying my last Tim Horton’s coffee and chocolate chip cookie that I would have for the next seven months. For in two hours, I would embark on the next stage in my life,

Let’s head back a couple months shall we? Back to when my friend asked me why I needed to go to university. That night, and many nights after that, I had gone home to do some research. I had found two things to set my sights on: a cooking academy in the south of France, called Gastronomicom, and the $15 000 I needed to save in order to get there. I don’t think I was ever so happy about my slightly above minimum wage job at the popular coffee shop, or the full time hours I was given there. In retrospect, I was even happier when I was offered a serving job and could start making double the money.

Fast forward through the stressful trips down to the French embassy, and the grueling hours I had to put in perfecting my French (okay, it was closer to knowing enough that I would be passable in a conversation) and I was leaving the gare de Adge—train station in Adge, the town I was to live in for the next three months. The town was beautiful in its own way. It had looked like a rich developer had come by in the late 70’s/early 80’s and raised all the resorts, painting them the bright colours anyone would expect to see next to the Mediterranean. As the years went on, it seemed as no one had the heart to update the little seaside town, and left it so. First impressions aside, I soon settled into my new apartment and new life; waking up every morning for three hours of cooking class at 9:00 a.m. and three hours of French class at 1:00 p.m. And my god, did I love this new life. Every day in class we would learn and prepare a new recipe, using ingredients and methods I could never have dreamt of in my past life. During lunches I would sit around a picnic table with my friends from Vietnam, Morocco, Indonesia, and Argentina. On the weekends we would take the train to a new town, where there would be markets set up outside churches built a thousand years before. This was the path I decided to take, and I could not have hated myself any more than if I had said to my friend years before that I needed to follow the line set out for me instead.

Wishful Thinking

Now as I stumbled my way through elementary and high school, I started to lose focus of the dream 11-year old me had set out to accomplish. What was the underlying reason towards this? As an adolescent my belief was that I had just lost interest. But as I grew older, and delved further into my studies and self-awareness, I started to think it was because of the external pressures placed on me during those years. You see, I came from a rather successful family that imposed on me that I must enroll in university classes during high school, and then the only way to continue on a path toward success was to attend university as well. After years and years of teachers telling me this as well, there was no surprise that the philosophy stuck in my mind, and my dream of cuisine started to be forgotten. Everything changed again during my rebellious teenage years (as things usually do for everyone), when I cared less about lab reports and assignments and grades, and more about how to avoid the responsibility of pleasing all the adults. Here I realized that maybe the traditional school system wasn’t for everyone, or maybe I just needed to take a break from it. As all my Grade 11 friends were starting to tour around the province looking at universities, I was having a personal crisis of how I could ever possibly succeed in post-secondary if I couldn’t even make it through a day without losing focus. The answer to all my problems should have been startlingly obvious, however it took naïve little me another whole year before a good friend turned to me and said, “Madison, why do you need to go to university? What’s stopping you from taking off for a year?” That night I had to take a good, hard look at myself and try to find the answer to that. Why did I need to go? The standards that were set in place were set unintentionally, they were never explicitly forced. I had just been more scared to disappoint than to believe in finding my own success. Running a popular business would still be successful to me—not putting myself into debt for a fancy piece of paper to work in an office. At the end of this awakening conversation with myself, I wondered, “now that I know where I don’t want to go, where is it that I would like to go?” The first thought that came to my mind was a memory—that of an innocent 5-year old me wishing to go to school in France.

The Beginning – Blog 1

When I was 10 years old, I went up to my mother and told her I wanted to become a vegetarian. She looked at me—eyes wide and a sizzling pan of ground beef in her hands. To her, working 50 hours a week, raising three girls, and keeping a household running was already a substantial portion on her plate in itself. To add one more course would just topple her precarious situation. She stared at me with what seemed like fear in her eyes. “Well kid, you can either eat what I make you, or start cooking your own meals,” was all she responded with. Now some people might see that as unsupportive and detrimental to a kid barely into the double digits. However I saw it as a challenge–a way to test my commitment to what I felt was right. Over the next couple years, my mother saw me develop and flourish from this task she had betrothed on me. I spent every dinner slaving away at the stove, every morning studying new types of ingredients. It strengthened our relationship as well: Thursday night recipe researching and Saturday morning grocery shopping became our rituals.

A couple years into this new system, I realized that my dedication in the kitchen was more than just a means to attain the strict diet I had. Cooking turned out to be something I truly enjoyed, and could I even say it at that point, maybe even loved. From the point that I knew that, I knew that I had to continue on that path.