3 This I Believe's

The first one I read was "My Husband Will Call Me Tomorrow" by Becky Herz

It was about a woman who gets through the day only by believing that her husband will call from where he is stationed in Iraq. She is raising their baby on her own and is very lonely and worried about her husband, but she manages to still have a positive outlook by hanging onto the belief that he will call the next day. She pulls herself through everyday routines: going shopping, feeding her dogs, going to work, all the while managing to do it with the belief that her husband will be safe, hanging on because if she does, he will call tomorrow.

Reading this essay, I felt so sad for her, but also very admiring. I think that most people in her position would not be able to handle it the way she does. It must be hard hanging onto the tiniest belief that her husband will call from Iraq. I would probably curl up in bed and eat junk food and be really depressed all the time if I was in her situation. It made me really hope that her husband will call, but more than that I hope that she will keep believing he will.


The second This I Believe I read was "Just Like Pastrami" by Lee Schulman.

The author talks about his childhood, when his parents bought a deli in Chicago. His father would always say that the meat was best if it was marbled, if all the flavors mixed together. His customers would complain if there was too much fat, and then say the meat was dry. He would answer that "without marbling, they'd never get what they wanted." The author then relates this metaphor to his life and his relationships with his students. he didn't want to get involved in their personal stories, until a 19 year old explained that she couldn't do the assignments because her husband had been killed in a car accident. He realized that he needed to be aware of their lives outside of class too.

I think that this essay makes a lot of sense. Sometimes it is easier to keep things separated, but in the end, things and people only make sense if you see the whole picture. Sometimes we make assumptions about people without really knowing them, and those assumptions are often wrong because we don't know the whole story. The metaphor of pastrami made sense with the author's message, which was that he believes that he must "work with the messy world of people, relationships and obligations in their full, rich complexity."


The third one I read was Baking by senses and memories, by Emily Smith

In this essay, the daughter talks about her childhood, just as the author of the previous essay did. She talks about baking with her Grandmother and her Grandmother's recipes. There are metaphors in the baking, like how she has learned to wait for hours for the dough to chill, which I think is a metaphor for patience in general. She also talks about how her mother always makes pecan pie, and although her pecan pie was different from her mother's both were good.

Something that interested me in this essay was when the author said, "I'm beginning to bake with my senses and my memory instead of with the recipe." It reminded me of something we learned in Asian about Taoism. The Taoists believed that in order to succeed, we need to reject the rules and names that society has given us and use our senses instead. The author uses baking as a connection to her past. She explains it at the end when she says, "I believe that as long as I keep baking, my grandmother hasn't really gone."