Thursday, November 1, 2007

Day 1
Number of Recipes Collected: 0

This morning at 6:30, I walked down my driveway and put the first 10 mailers begging people to participate in this crazy hair-brained project of mine into my mailbox. Then I lifted up the little red flag on the outside of the mailbox. I grinned with excitement as I walked back to my house in the dark. My Recipe Collection Project had officially begun!

I will be sending out a grand total of 250 of these mailers asking people to participate in my quest for 1,000 recipes. They have all the same information on them that’s here on this webpage. I’ve printed the mailers onto brightly colored card stock and will be mailing them to big cities and small towns in all 50 states.

I’m going to mail them to public libraries. I’m a librarian. We’re readers and information people. We’re resourceful. So I figure, librarians might help me out. I went online and found addresses for public libraries across the country. I’m mailing 5 cards to each state in the hopes that each person who receives one will participate, send me a recipe, and pass the mailer along to a friend. And that person passes it along. Etc.

Oh, yeah. I’ve also emailed my blog address to all my friends, so hopefully they’ll pass it along to their friends. You get the idea.

Last night was my Big Launch Party. Okay, so that’s a misnomer, but I did get together with some friends. I met up with Becky, Andy, and Sarah for our third annual Halloween dinner at our favorite Mexican dive and showed off my first mailer. And I’m happy to say it generated quite a buzz. It turns out that they thought it was kind of a cool idea. In between bites, Becky asked, “Why can the recipes only be sent via snail mail?” I’m a latecomer to the 21st century. I value simplicity. I don’t have Internet at my house. I don’t have cable. And in my search for recipes from home, recipes that feed families, and that have been passed down from generation to generation, I feel receiving the recipes via snail mail is my nod to a simpler time. Also it makes the project a lot more challenging.

And so there we were, ignoring the trick-or-treaters who were probably knocking on our doors wondering where we were, rattling off lists of people we knew who lived all over the country or who knew people who lived somewhere else. Sarah pulled out her knitting and worked on a sock she was making, and Becky and Andy started debating the merits of the book Atonement by Ian McEwan, and I dipped my chip into more cheese and felt a warm tingling in my toes just thinking about how next year on Halloween we wouldn’t be celebrating the launch of my project, we would be celebrating the end.

So, a couple hours and bowls of cheese dip later, I finally went home to a few straggling trick-or-treaters and sat on my couch and addressed the 10 envelopes I mailed this morning.