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By Root 1177 0

dad showing up. We had never been particularly close, and I had a hard time recalling any activity we’d done together without other family members present. It was neat to discover that we both shared a huge respect for Pete Seeger—although mine was due more to his environmental achievements than his music. Of course, my dad and I had another thing in common: a passion for cooking. When he showed up, as I was in the midst of serving an enormous crowd of festival-goers, I was all too eager to step aside for a moment and walk around the room with him. We looked at other chili-themed vendors selling hot sauce and chutneys. We talked about the chili that I’d made. My dad’s cooking signature may be pies, but a close runner-up just might be his chili, for which he had earned a reputation. As Matt Timms and many others have put it, chili is great communal food—it feeds the masses. It keeps well, travels well, and is open to interpretation with a number of flavors and ingredients. That’s why it’s such common fare, I think, for cook-offs. My memories of chili from my youth have always stemmed from my dad cooking up an enormous pot to keep eating for leftovers the entire week.

I left my dad to wander around the festival for a while as I got back to my chili-serving station. The other participants in the contest were great company. I’d seen them all at previous Takedowns but had never really had a chance to talk to any of them much. Three of them were guys in their late twenties or early thirties, and one was a middle-aged woman. Instead of being competitive, we teased, chided, chatted, and helped one another at our serving stations when it was needed. We talked to the endless flow of festival-goers, too, telling them about what we had put in our unique formulas. I got the feeling that none of us cared who won the contest at all.

I ran out of chili by the last half hour of serving. The throngs of people that came in for that time period didn’t get a taste, and I knew I’d missed any chance of winning the vote. When Matt finally rounded up the contestants to announce the winners, we each took a turn at the microphone to talk about our recipes. I could see my dad in the audience smiling proudly as I explained my interpretation of the dish—which I’d named, for Pete Seeger’s sake, “If I Had a Pepper.” When I was awarded third place out of five, my dad proudly clapped and kept smiling, as did Nora and Andrea, her roommate, who’d showed up for the announcement ceremony that afternoon groggy from their long night of partying. I wasn’t surprised at all when first place was given to the guy who’d made a smoky chili with turkey sausage, bacon, and a good ratio of vegetables.

I stuck around with friends and the chili contestants for a while afterward. By late afternoon, Pete Seeger still hadn’t begun his act, and my dad was beginning to feel a little tired. To my surprise, he decided to take off early. It was drizzling anyhow, and the tarpcovered field where the music stage was set looked soggy and sort of unpleasant. No big deal, he said. I shrugged and thanked him for coming.

I made sure to take plenty of pictures of Pete Seeger while I watched him sing that afternoon. My dad had been right; it was muddy, and people were camped out on tarps underneath a huge tent that covered the field. Still, the crowd that had come out for the performance was enormous. Families, young people, and old people in wheelchairs alike were smiling, nodding, singing along, and in some cases shedding a tear of gratitude. And Pete Seeger could really sing—still. He had fire in his voice, a warmness and dearness made all the more sweet due to the fact that his backup vocalist and guitarist was his grandson, Tao Rodríguez-Seeger. The other performer, a bassist who frequently played with the duo, was Guy Davis. I didn’t hear them play the song “If I Had a Hammer”—perhaps I’d missed it by the time I got to the tent—but I heard plenty of other songs that my dad must have listened to with his friends when he was about my age.

A couple of weeks later, my mom called me