Sometimes when you post, you gather people from the rainbow of your life. Oh, that one and I went to high school. That one and I wrote for the Voice. That one and I lived in Long Beach. That one and I used to pass each other on the Upper West Side.

I feel a particularly sweet affinity to people I met as part of a group, as part of a thing only we breathed and swam in, we feel. The other day, I was thinking about the groups that made my life. Made my life in the way I'm describing, and when I hear from anyone in these groups, a peace falls over me, as if I was really there. Yes, that's me in the group photo.

What are the groups that produce this feeling? Woodmere Academy, the Village Voice, the early years of the women's movement, the world of professional catering and food service in New York City.

I always forget how long it takes to make anything that tastes good. The thinking about it, the shopping and up in Hudson the where the hell can I get this cheese or that spice (nowhere), the chopping, the arrangement of pots and pans, the several stages of prepping and then sauteing and deep frying. I forget because I like doing it in the context of a job and I don't want to think there is not enough money in this for me, given the time.

I like remembering the way service people always function as secret ops, taking notes on the way power works on the food chain and what your place is assumed to be on it. Will this person say please and thank you? Will that one make eye contact with you? Will this other one restrict their questions to the food you've prepared?

Why do I like remembering these things? I'm not entirely certain, but it gives me a sort of charge to be misidentified although not entirely misidentified. I really am the caterer.