Start Late, Start Badly

Cedar Valley News
August 13, 2026
Start Late, Start Badly
By Chloe Papadakis

Every so often I teach a beginner class. Watercolors, or clay, or once, memorably, the ukulele. And every time, the same small thing happens at the door. A grown adult stands just outside it, coat still on, holding the little supply list, and cannot come in. I have learned to know the look by now. It is not confusion about the room. It is the plain fear of being bad at something in front of other people. Some work up the nerve and step through. Some turn around and go home, and I never see them again.

I have been thinking about the ones who go home this week, because today, the thirteenth of August, is the anniversary of the day Julia Child died, back in 2024, two days shy of her ninety-second birthday. And if the person frozen in the doorway ever had a patron saint, it was her.

Here is the part people forget. Julia Child was no prodigy. She did not grow up at her mother’s elbow rolling out pastry. By her own cheerful account, she could not really cook until she was into her thirties. Up until then, she liked to say, she just ate. She was a tall, loud, uncertain woman from Pasadena who did not find the thing she loved until most of us have long since decided who we are. She got serious about it in…