Cake Life

We are awash in cake.

Red velvet, chocolate, caramel, and carrot. Big chunks of cake brought from the grocery by our son and daughter for their dad’s 72nd birthday yesterday. Then there is the Mexican chocolate cake I made the night before.

There is so much cake that yesterday I ate three pieces, including one piece of caramel cake that I ate out of my hand like I might a taco hot from the grill, dripping with sauce. I licked the frosting off my fingertips while I watched the end of a movie alone in my upstairs office, the cat peering at me from his perch at the top of his ridiculously large cat tree.

I am not always good with birthdays. When my children were growing up, I was uneven in my birthday behavior, one year organizing big, unruly birthday parties and, the next, yawning Happy Birthday over the breakfast cereal and handing them a birthday card with a $20 bill. Once, hoping to do just enough to get to the day after a birthday, I made a sheet cake from a boxed mix and then slathered on frosting from a tin with a plastic cover. A friend at the time, someone who knew from whence he spoke, used a toothpick to write INSTITUTIONAL FROSTING which it was, I knew that, but I didn’t care. It would do.

I did well with yesterday’s birthday. I baked the chocolate cake and made a glorious steak and double baked potato dinner with a perfect salad of very buttery Boston lettuce and perfectly cut triangles of $16 a pound bleu cheese. I gave my husband a handsome and very functional pair of shoes because he never buys anything new for himself and a framed picture of us on our porch with our two dogs.

The photo was taken early in the pandemic by a professional photographer doing a porch project or something like that – people all over the city were posing like they were happy in their jeans and hoodies and stoicism. It was when we thought all the lockdown business and toilet paper hoarding would be done in a few weeks. In the picture, we look very happy, like people who had towers of Spam and tuna in foil packets, bags of black beans, and giant cardboard silos of oatmeal. We had our dogs and each other which was all we thought we needed at the time.

In the beginning we arranged little outdoor meetings to see our adult kids who lived in town. We’d meet up at the lakefront and go for walks in the whipping spring wind, we’d bring camp chairs and sit under the trees at a nearby park in the summer and eat donuts, the box placed carefully in the middle of our circle of chairs, so no one got too close to anyone else. I made Thanksgiving and Hanukkah dinners and packed them in cardboard boxes which we delivered to their doors. And then I got tired of it. It was so much work. I just wanted to have INSTITUTIONAL FROSTING and be done with it.

I love my kids but I’m not central to their lives anymore which is as it should be, that doesn’t make me sad in any way. But during the pandemic, I may have become surprisingly comfortable with loving the idea of them rather than actually loving them face to face. And, as the pandemic continued, this posture, this position of distance love or love in the abstract became more and more natural.

The insulation of the pandemic, the self-sufficiency of it – the emotional self-tending that went along with the gallon jugs of hand sanitizer and the search for better, stronger masks reinforced my mother’s adage that if you don’t expect anything, you’re never disappointed. I expected nothing from my kids. I needed nothing from them. I had spun my cocoon without them.

Then, yesterday, two of my kids came to the door with cake. We cut slices of cake and drank coffee. We talked about the winter and the pandemic. We laughed about trips we’d taken together and considered plans for the summer. When they left, I packaged up some of the cake for them to take with them. The rest of the cake – chunks of red velvet, chocolate, caramel, and carrot – sits under a plastic cover on the kitchen counter. It is lovely having the cake there, knowing it is there, that whenever I feel like it, I can go in the kitchen and have a slice. It seems like a special moment, a pivotal one. I think I may end up needing to have cake all the time.

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Photo by Jordane Mathieu on Unsplash