"Love
sought is good, but given unsought better."
Twelfth Night, Act III, Scene I
I can't help it. I'm worried about my daughter,
Julie.
The way she works so hard and comes home exhausted
every night, it doesn't seem like she has any fun in her life,
no joie
de vivre! No man, either. Not that men are any guarantee
of happiness. (As anyone who's met Frank, my husband, knows, ha,
ha.) But it would give me tremendous peace of mind if
I could leave God's green Earth assured that my little girl
had someone who made her laugh and took care of her. Someone
who loves her as much as I do.
Because I don't have much time.
Not that I'm
sick. Actually, I feel terrific. Old, yes, but I'm seventy five
for heaven's sake and I've already survived a bout of breast
cancer. I won't be a Jack LaLane pulling a boat at ninety that's
for sure, even if I do walk three miles a day and always take
the stairs.
Just that I've been dizzy lately and yesterday
when I took down the cookbook to look up a recipe for Indian
pudding – a
recipe I used to know by heart – the words turned fuzzy.
I had to sit at the kitchen table staring at the pages in order
to make sense of them. Yet, no matter how I squinted with or
without my glasses, the blurring wouldn't stop.
I called out to
Frank, "I think I've been hit!" And
Frank, in the living room as always, told me to lie down and
take it easy, that we didn't need dessert tonight.
That's when
I knew my time was near. If I can't read, if I can't make a simple
Indian pudding, then I don't see the point in living much more,
really. Because aside from a good book and, perhaps, a fresh
morning in a dew-covered garden, few things in life give me as
much pleasure as the magic of making a truly spectacular dessert.
I'm a big believer in dessert. And let me tell
you, if there were more dessert believers like me, this whole
country would be a much nicer place. Certainly better than the
nation of jittery, testy insomniacs we've become thanks to those
damned Starbucks on every corner.
I swear this national caffeine addiction is
what's making everyone so angry these day. Have you noticed?
We're angry about the war, about debt, about politics, work,
Global Warming, gas prices, the economy, our neighbors. But mostly,
it seems to me, people are angry about not being more successful.
They're so busy getting ahead and not falling behind that they've
forgotten the simple, inexpensive pleasures. Like eating fresh
blueberry pie with vanilla ice cream outside on the picnic bench
after a day of swimming and picking berries. Or gathering with
friends in front of the fire on a snowy evening with hot buttery bread
pudding and baked apples while outside a winter wind howls.
That's
what dessert means to me – a dollop of sweet love
in an otherwise cold world.
When the kids were growing and Frank
was still in construction, I made sure all our meals ended with
dessert. Frank deserved it. Sour cream brownies, banana pie made
with vanilla wafers, lemon poppy seed pound cake, strawberry
shortcake, almond-scented tapioca, pecan blondies (oh…my…God
those are good), butter brickle ice cream with butterscotch,
angel food cake with rhubarb compote, gingerbread with hard sauce
and, on Saturday nights, peppermint ice cream sundaes topped
with homemade hot fudge.
Homemade hot fudge is a snap to make on the stove with dark chocolate
broken into heavy cream and corn syrup. It's a shame so many
people buy that glop from the store. I tried to teach Julie how,
but she'd have nothing of it. Julie hates to cook - because of
me.
She's never said so to my face, naturally,
but I know. I know she thinks I've been trapped in the kitchen,
forced to serve her father the meat-and-three dinners he liked
to have waiting for him as soon as he walked through the door.
I can see that my life frightens her.
The thing is, she doesn't remember being
a girl and helping me at the wooden board rolling out her little
ball of pastry while I made pie. And how, all by herself, she
delighted in folding her dough around a spoonful of raspberry
jam. She forgets how she used to clap when it came out of the
oven, her tiny pie, brown and sparkling with cinnamon sugar as
it cooled next to my own.
I'd give anything to see her so happy again, especially since
she's so alone these days and so wrapped up in her work she's
forgotten to breathe, to live, to love.
Sometimes I think it's
my fault for standing in the way of the man who truly loved her.
But what was a mother to do? She was seventeen, a baby, and he
was twenty one, a man. I saw the lascivious way he looked at
her. I heard the scuttlebutt from my son. If I hadn't taken that
young man aside and warned him in no uncertain terms to stay
away, there's no telling what trouble she might have gotten herself
into.
But now that I'm older and wiser and
have learned youthful indiscretions heal quickly while broken
hearts do not, I have to admit I might have been wrong. I know
for certain Julie's never felt that way about another man since
- though she pretends to despise him. And I just bet he isn't
over her either - though he acts
as if he is.
The good news is that right when I decided
it was too late for an old lady to correct her mistake, I was
offered a second chance to bring them together in, of all places,
a dessert class.
You
never know, it just might work. Like the garlic mustard in my
garden and the roses on my fence, love has a funny way of blooming
after years of being buried. If it's true love, then it will
abide. If it was a fleeting crush, then it will turn to dust.
Either way, the truth will out - at last.
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