How does one stay so sharp after five decades of grading papers, proctoring exams, and urging students to read and write more? Somehow, Berger knows.
And that’s when it occurred to me: Charles should write a cookbook.
Not a general-audience cookbook, no, this one would be for the composition-and-literature-teacher crowd, a truly niche but wanting readership.
This cookbook would explain which foods sustain a person through decades of meetings. It would offer meal-prep strategies for those long stretches of the semester when you wonder why students aren’t completing the assignments. There would be a section on selecting just the right spices to help you power through the novels you love, and what to sauté when you’re reading the novels you find uninteresting.
More than anything, it would provide recipes for how to persist, adapt, stay curious, and keep showing up to the classroom for half a century.
For these reasons, I formally recommend that, during his retirement, Charles Berger should write a cookbook.
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Charles’s secret: He was everyone’s favorite lunch companion—how do you think he collected all of that good insider information?—but he was the only one I know who had the restraint not to order the french fries at the (oddly-themed) campus restaurant, “Fixin’s,” despite the fact that they were the best thing on the menu.
And I will add that I once witnessed Charles take HALF of a fun-sized Snickers from the bowl on Linda’s desk, a fact for which I mocked him for several years. (Maybe this was a Yale thing?)
Charles’s secret: He was everyone’s favorite lunch companion—how do you think he collected all of that good insider information?—but he was the only one I know who had the restraint not to order the french fries at the (oddly-themed) campus restaurant, “Fixin’s,” despite the fact that they were the best thing on the menu.
And I will add that I once witnessed Charles take HALF of a fun-sized Snickers from the bowl on Linda’s desk, a fact for which I mocked him for several years. (Maybe this was a Yale thing?)
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