lamb meatballs with rhubarb chutney

Deconstruct. I find the action behind that word quite frightening. It’s hard. Construct. Construct is better. Building is much easier. There’s a start and an end goal. But evaluating, breaking things into pieces, and adapting as a result—well that’s just so much more difficult. Important but arduous.

I vividly remember my least favorite task in elementary school—second and third grade to be exact. Storyboards. Instead of writing a report, analyzing at the beat of our own young-minded understanding, we had to break up a story into parts. Concrete parts. I am now an ardent maker and follower of rules. But to me then, nothing was concrete. We were required to fit a story into distinct categories and subcategories, from “exposition” to “climax” to “dénouement.” The “scenes” that represented these categories were drawn carefully in Crayola colored pencil within clear lines and boxes. Rigid. One scene could not mean or be or act as two things. We had to identify a protagonist and antagonist. Well, that just wasn’t me. I wanted the protagonist to be the character who was compelling to me. And this character was often not the technical protagonist. And in third grade, what if I desperately wanted the story to be my story and what if when character X walks to Y wearing Z, it was me who I envisioned in her place? I’ve changed. I am more practical. I do see aspects of life in concrete terms now. But deconstruction can still be a struggle.

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