glasses off.

Quite a few years ago, in my first year as a corporate lawyer, I was sent to Chicago to conduct due diligence for an M&A deal. I went to the client’s upon arrival, looked through some documents, and asked for more. The client needed time to gather them, and said perhaps they’d be ready the next morning. I caught up with an old friend from my Northwestern days in the evening, and slept extremely well that night. The firm’s travel agent had booked me into the Ritz Carlton. The Ritz is pretty iffy depending on the city, but Chicago’s is still one of the nicest hotels in town.

The next morning, I called the client, who said they wouldn’t be ready until noon. So I spent the morning in bed. I ordered breakfast to my room, blueberry buckwheat pancakes. In my memory, they remain the best pancakes I’ve ever had. They were flavorful, light, moist, perfectly sized. I probably had a pot of hot chocolate, too. I went to the client in the early afternoon, billed a reasonable number of hours, and flew back home.

I think I have such fond memories of those pancakes so many years later because that was the easiest deal I’d be on during my entire corporate career. I was fresh out of school, I was still learning, I expected to work hard, and wasn’t quite sure what the world might bring. A morning sitting in a bathrobe eating blueberry buckwheat pancakes and getting paid to do it seemed ridiculously indulgent. The corporate world wasn’t what impassioned me, but I was making an obscene amount of money for what I was doing, and honestly, the best thing about it was being able to give it away. (So if you have a gift for doing something that can make money, don’t be ashamed of it, just be a good steward.)

A few years later, corporate travel would weary me, first class would be the least that could get me through the second cross-country red-eye of the week, and ordering breakfast in would be wasted on picking at muffins between getting dressed at 7am and finalising the morning’s deposition outline. I was working so much I didn’t even have the time to make heartfelt giving decisions.

I associate those pancakes, I think, with a very particular moment in time. Maybe a moment when I didn’t quite need to know that material indulgences couldn’t make up for really, a lot.

This afternoon we made blueberry buckwheat pancakes on my griddle. The pancakes were only fine this morning, nothing special. They weren’t very light or moist, I made them myself, and I did not serve them with real silver. But there were Steve, and Tom, and Alissa, all people I like very much. It was a quiet New York Sunday afternoon, after a restful (if sickly) week away and a good sermon, before the start of another work week doing something for which I get paid very modestly, and which I love. The travel perks include unfamiliar foods that sometimes cannot be politely refused, dust storms, and 5 hour layovers in airports on the other side of the world.

So, the pancakes. I’ve always remembered, and wondered what it would be like to have them again. It turns, out, you can’t. But you can guard the memory, and it helps you know where you are now.