Writing Life

Archive for August, 2009

My wife is a volunteer for Happy Tails, a private nonprofit animal shelter in Sacramento. A week or two ago we got an email informing us that Happy Tails would be holding a bake sale today to raise money for its shelter. Because I love to bake, I thought this would be a good opportunity to whip up some tasty treats while also making a contribution to a worthy cause. I planned to do all my baking on Monday, the 24th of August, and have it ready to deliver the next day. What I didn’t foresee was that, come Monday (yesterday), I would be fairly tired of baking after a long weekend of doing almost nothing else.

It all began on Friday, the 21st. I decided to make some vegetarian quesadillas for dinner that night. Whenever I make quesadillas or tacos or burritos, I always make fresh flour tortillas from scratch. Thus, Friday afternoon found me with my hands buried wrist-deep in a mixture of flour and shortening and water as I kneaded my ball of dough into shape. By the time my wife arrived home, I had produced eight perfect little homemade tortillas. That was my first baking project of the weekend, and it was a fairly simple one.

When Julie arrived home she informed me that my granddaughter Ashleigh had survived the last cut and was now officially a member of her high school’s varsity volleyball team. What’s more, the team was playing in its first tournament the next day, Saturday, and naturally they would be expecting some homemade cookies from Grandpa Kevin. Thus, after Julie went to bed that night, I stayed awake to whip up a batch of peanut-butter chocolate chip cookies. Actually, all I whipped up was the batter. The cookies hold their shapes better if you let the batter rest in the refrigerator overnight. So I didn’t bake the cookies until the next morning, just a short time before we left for the tournament, which began at 8:00 a.m., and was being held at Del Oro High School in Loomis. The weekend was young and already I had completed two small baking projects: tortillas and cookies.

At the volleyball tournament, my stepdaughter Mary Ann informed me that she would be hosting a going-away party for my granddaughter Christina that evening. Christina had enrolled in a college in Southern California and was all set to move downstate later in the week. Christina is twenty-one years old and has lived at home with her parents her entire life, so this was an exciting change for her. To celebrate, her mother decided that her Aunt Mary Ann ought to throw a party for her that evening. Mary Ann asked me if I could bake two cakes for the party. I said I would. But the annual Paper and Postcard Show was being held that weekend at the Scottish Rite Temple in Sacramento and my wife and I usually spend a good part of both Saturday and Sunday at the temple whenever the show is in town (Julie collects postcards commemorating old ocean liners, but that is a subject for a later essay). Because we intended to visit the postcard show directly after the end of the volleyball tournament, I would have little time to bake my cakes before the beginning of the going-away party at six-thirty.

When the volleyball tournament ended, we raced off to the Scottish Rite Temple, where Julie spent several hours perusing old ocean liner memorabilia (she also collects menus, passenger lists, and other ephemera from the days when great passenger ships like the Mauritania and the Normandie still plied the waves). I bided my time looking for postcards commemorating some of my favorite writers (I purchased a Robert Burns postcard, a Robert Louis Stevenson postcard, and a few others.) The great thing about collecting old postcards is that they are relatively cheap. The cards we purchased last weekend cost ten bucks on average. We can’t afford to collect first-edition books from the early 20th century, or original paintings from that era. But vintage postcards rarely put much of a dent in our wallets.

At three-thirty I was back home and ready to do some more baking. When I bake a cake for some special occasion, I refuse to use a mix that comes in a box. I take great pride in my baked goods and always whip them up from scratch. For Christina’s first cake, I decided to make a Pocono Mountains Crème Cake, which I had baked several times before with great success. I got the recipe from a collection of prize-winning cake recipes from America’s State Fairs. The book has one cake recipe for each of the fifty U.S. states. The Pocono Mountains Cake was a prizewinner at the Pennsylvania State Fair some years ago. It is not an easy cake to make. The cake alone requires fifteen ingredients, and the frosting another five. But I managed to whip up the batter and get it into the oven in about a half hour. After that, I had to hand wash all of the implements — measuring cups, measuring spoons, spatulas, mixing bowls, etc – that I had used on the first cake before I could begin the second cake. Actually, I assigned this task to Julie. She balked at first, because she was busy putting her new postcards into her ocean liner album. But I insisted that if I was going to do all the baking, she had to do all the cleaning up.

For my birthday, a week earlier, Julie had given me a cookbook called “Sky High: Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes.” It was filled challenging cake recipes that called out to my inner dessert chef. After flipping through the book’s pages, I decided to attempt the sour cream-chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting and chocolate-peanut butter glaze. It’s always a bit scary whenever you begin baking from a new cookbook whose author you know nothing about. A lot of cookbooks are poorly put together, the recipes in them full of omissions and improper instructions. If you are going to make a cake from a new cookbook, it is wise not to begin it at the last minute. If it turns out that the cookbook’s author is an incompetent idiot, you may end up with nothing to show for your efforts but a dirty kitchen. So I began this cake with great trepidation. If it failed, I would show up at Christina’s going-away party with just one cake, which wouldn’t be sufficient to feed all of the guests. What’s more, this was another challenging recipe. It required the preparation of not just a cake, but of both a homemade frosting and a homemade glaze to pour over the frosting. As I put together the cake batter I began to fear that perhaps the cookbook’s authors, Alisa Huntsman and Peter Wynne, were not the baking experts the dust jacket claimed they were. The batter, which included a cup of sour cream, a cup of vegetable oil, one and a half cups of water, two tablespoons of distilled white vinegar, two eggs, and a teaspoon of vanilla extract, seemed way too runny even before I added the water to it. I called Julie away from her ocean liners and asked if I ought to add only half of the water that the recipe called for. She insisted that I stick to the recipe and just see what would happen. That way we would know if we could trust the cookbook in the future. So I poured in the water and produced a batter that was as thin as hot chocolate. It looked as if it would never harden into an actual cake, no matter how long I left it in the oven. I slipped the three cake pans full of watery batter into the oven, set the timer for thirty-five minutes, and then crossed my fingers.

Miraculously, when I opened the oven thirty-five minutes later, I found that the batter in all three cake pans had been transformed into a light, fluffy, and perfect layer of cake. These were extremely moist cake layers, to be sure, but they held together perfectly. I let them cool and then I frosted and glazed them and took them to the party where they were a big hit with the guests, even more popular than my beloved Pocono Mountains Cake. By the end of the day Saturday, my weekend baking projects included eight tortillas, two dozen peanut-butter chocolate chip cookies, two three layer-cakes, two homemade frostings, and a homemade cake glaze.

On Sundays, Julie and I often make what we call a Taylor’s feast, because generally the best part of it (the fish, or meat, or other protein) is purchased at Taylor’s Market on Freeport Boulevard, which is close to our home. Usually Julie is the one who whips together our Taylor’s feasts, to reward me for having made dinner the other six days of the week. But last weekend, I decided I wanted to play a role in the feast-making. I found a recipe for hushpuppies in a Cook’s Illustrated magazine and decided to whip up a batch of these treats as a pre-feast appetizer. What’s more, in the same magazine I found a recipe for a dessert called a “midnight cake.” This looked like an extremely easy cake to make, and I thought it might be a relief to whip up a quick and easy cake for Sunday night’s dessert after having baked two relatively challenging cakes on Saturday. For her part, Julie made an incredibly tasty concoction of grilled seafood served on a bed of rice and topped with a cilantro-mint salsa. By the end of the day on Sunday, I was pretty much all gourmet-ed out. And suddenly I wasn’t looking forward all that eagerly to the baking I would have to do on Monday in order to contribute to the Happy Tails bake sale.

Monday was a hectic day for me. I had a busy schedule which precluded me from even starting my baking until after dinner. And, feeling tired and lazy, I didn’t actually begin the baking until after I had spent an hour in front of the television with Julie, watching old episodes of “Will & Grace” that we had rented from NetFlix. Not until Julie went to bed at 9:30 p.m. did I finally begin my baking. And as soon as I did, I realized that I was out of unsweetened cocoa powder. So I lost twenty minutes making a run to Raley’s to pick up the cocoa powder and a few other possible necessities. When I returned from Raley’s I began putting together another incarnation of that easy “midnight cake” whose recipe I had discovered in Cook’s Illustrated. The recipe calls for only seven ingredients. This convenience is attained by using mayonnaise (which contains oil and eggs) rather than oil and eggs. To make it, you combine two cups of all-purpose flour, a quarter cup of unsweetened cocoa powder, and two teaspoons of baking soda in one bowl. In another you mix together one cup of mayo, one cup of sugar, and one teaspoon of vanilla extract. Then you put a third of the dry ingredients into the wet mixture and stir it together. Next pour in a half cup of water and stir again. Then another third of the dry ingredients and more stirring. Then one more half cup of water and more stirring. And finally the last third of the dry ingredients and one final stir. At that point you grease and flour a 9×13 inch cake pan and pour the batter into it. Bake it at 350 degrees for about 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean (don’t forget to preheat the oven). When the cake comes out and cools off a bit, you can sprinkle powdered sugar on top of it, if you like (an eighth ingredient). Alas, because it was late and I was in a hurry, I sprinkled on the powdered sugar right away. This turned out to be a mistake. While the cake cooled a bit, I whipped up some cookie batter, which I then place inside the refrigerator so that it could cool overnight.

When the cookie batter was done, I began cutting up my midnight cake into twelve slices. I put these slices on paper plates, and then I inserted each slice into a large ziplock bag along with a plastic fork. I didn’t seal the bags because I feared the warmth of the cake would create moisture inside the bag that would cause the slices to grow soggy overnight. After all twelve slices were plated and bagged, I set them aside for the night.

I awoke early this morning to bake my cookies and to seal the cake slices. But while my cookies were baking, I retrieved the cake slices only to discover that the powdered sugar on top of them had grown a bit soggy overnight, causing it to take on an unappetizing yellowish tint. I was going to throw the slices out and take only the cookies to the bake sale, but I tasted one slice of cake and found it so delicious I didn’t have the heart to throw it out. Instead I removed the remaining slices from their bags and applied another layer of powdered sugar to the tops of them. Then I had to slip the slices back into their bags very carefully so as not to scrape off the second later of powdered sugar. The woman running the bake sale insisted that the major ingredients of each individual item be labeled, so that the purchasers would know what they were buying. I didn’t want to call my cake a “chocolate mayonnaise cake” because I thought that might turn off potential customers. So I wrote up a dozen individual labels that said “Chocolate Cake Topped With Powdered Sugar.” I stuck these to the interior of the ziplock bags and then sealed up the bags. When the cookies were done I wrote up two-dozen labels that said “Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies” and then prepared another two dozen ziplock bags.

The bake sale was held just outside the north entrance of the State Capital Building, and it began at 7:30 this morning. Because of all my missteps and setbacks, I didn’t arrive at the Capital until about 9:00 a.m. At that hour, it was impossible to find a parking space anywhere near the site of sale. I had to park two blocks away and make two separate trips with an armload of baked goods. By the time I had finally dropped off all of my cookies and cake slices, I was fairly sick of baking. I only hope those darn cats at Happy Tails appreciate all the hard work I did for them last night and early this morning.

At any rate, my final tally for the last four days is: eight flour tortillas, four dozen peanut-butter chocolate chip cookies, two dozen hushpuppies, two three-layer cakes, two sheet cakes, two frostings, and one glaze. I think I might take a break from baking for a while.

Recently, National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” program held a Three-Minute Fiction contest. More than 5000 stories were submitted to the competition, none of them longer than 600 words. After reading over the winning stories online yesterday, I decided to write a few 600-word stories of my own. I’ve won a several contests sponsored by the Sacramento News & Review for stories as short as 59 words. Thus, I figured I wouldn’t find myself too constrained by a word limit of 600 words. I was wrong. It is extremely difficult to write a short story of no more than 600 words. I take off my hat to the winners of NPR’s contest. Below are three of my own efforts, which weigh in at 462, 583, and 595 words, respectively:

THE USELESS DIAMONDS

“Mother left them to me in her will. The last of the once-great Linlithgow estate. A few years later, after my divorce, I ran into financial difficulties. I couldn’t bear to sell them, so I reported them stolen and collected the insurance. Now, of course, they are far too notorious to be sold legally. Any knowledgeable jeweler in London would recognize them instantly. They’d have to be recut. The necklace broken up into individual stones and sold off separately. It would take a criminal mastermind to oversee it all, and I am no mastermind – criminal or otherwise. I cannot wear them. I cannot sell them. I cannot even give them away to my beloved niece, Clare. They are useless to me. And the effort of concealing them has finally grown too taxing for me to bear.”

“So you are traveling on this great ship to New York, where the diamonds are not as well known. Where the jewelers are less likely to recognize you. Where the police have no suspicions of you. You plan to resell them there and begin life anew in America. Is that it?

“Not at all. I plan to drop them over this rail at midnight and send them to the bottom of the sea. They have brought me nothing but ill luck. I shall be happy to see them go.”

“Surely, Lady Ainsworth, you will do no such a thing! Those diamonds were your mother’s last earthly gift to you.”

“The things I have learned about her since her death have tarnished my memory of her forever: The adulteries. The scandal in Nairobi. The suspicious death of the Earl of Bumbridge. You know…I’ve come to believe that these diamonds represent Bumbridge’s final revenge on my family.”

“But they must be worth fifty-thousand pounds! Please, Lady Ainsworth, I beg you not to destroy them. Let me buy them from you. If I can raise five thousand pounds before midnight will you sell them to me? I promise never to tell where I got them. You can give the money to your niece, if you like.”

“But they are cursed. Have you no superstitions?”

“I can’t afford them. Please, those diamonds could help save my father’s firm. He’ll be ruined if we can’t find enough capital to keep the mills running.”

“And do you happen to be carrying five thousand pounds on you?”

“Not a tenth that much. But if you’ll just give me two hours time, I’ll raise the money even if I have to borrow ten quid from every single gentleman on the Titanic.”

Lady Ainsworth opened her fingers and let the diamonds slip into the ink-black waters of the North Atlantic.

“I’m sorry she said. But I couldn’t bear to bring such bad luck upon you.”

PENNIES

Doug hated the pennies. Mr. Keyes hid them throughout the hospital before the start of each shift. If a janitor didn’t find all the pennies hidden in an assigned work area, Mr. Keyes would know he or she hadn’t done a thorough job of cleaning the area.

“I hid eleven pennies in your service area tonight, Mr. Holt. Why have you brought me only nine of them? Did you not clean behind all the toilets?”

Doug would shrug his shoulders and try to smile his way out of it. But Mr. Keyes couldn’t be charmed out of his commitment to keeping the hospital clean. If the pennies didn’t add up correctly, he would lead Doug back to the oncology department, or the outpatient clinic, or the maternity ward and figure out just what parts of it had been neglected that night. Somehow Mr. Keyes could always remember the placement of every penny he had hidden in a given workspace. And when he found a penny lying behind a bed or a toilet or a desk, he’d make Doug re-clean the entire room. Some nights, Doug had to thoroughly redo three or four rooms before he was allowed to punch out – all because of a few damn pennies.

Early in his tenure at the hospital, Doug tried to trick Mr. Keyes by keeping some extra pennies in his pocket. One night, when Mr. Keyes told him, “You missed three pennies, Mr. Holt,” Doug reached into his pocket and said, “Oh, here they are,” and added three more coins to the total. But this didn’t fool Mr. Keyes. He led a sheepish Doug back into the ophthalmology department and quickly discovered the areas that Doug had failed to clean.

Doug worked the graveyard shift, although they never called it that at the hospital (the shifts were referred to as “the daytime,” “the swing,” and “the overnight,” as if Doug’s onerous eleven p.m. to eight a.m. tour of duty were somehow akin to a children’s slumber party or a short camp-out). Whenever Doug arrived home from work late, Ginny would look at him and say, “Missed a few pennies?” And an irritable Doug would grunt in the affirmative.

Years later, when he was CEO of his own Silicon Valley firm, Doug still bent down to pick up every penny he saw glinting from parking lot, sidewalk, or supermarket floor. In magazine profiles this was often cited as an example of his tight-fistedness. “Doug Holt: the ultimate penny-pincher,” read the headline of one such profile in the Wall Street Journal.

But if you ask one of Doug’s employees about it, they’ll tell you a different story. They’ll say that his penny-grabbing is just another in the long series of eccentric behaviors that have marked his unconventional rise to the top of the industry, a series that began with the hiring of an elderly African-American gentleman, with no technological background whatsoever, to oversee productivity at the company’s first production facility. “All his competitors laughed at him,” these employees will tell you, “but Doug got the last laugh when that facility began producing record high efficiency numbers. What’s more, when the old guy retired to Florida after only two years of service with the company, Doug continued to pay him a full salary plus benefits. And later, when the man died, Doug financed a new pediatric center at the local hospital and named it after him. Now, does that sound like the behavior of a penny pincher to you?”

THE NOBLE BOLTER

She had a gift for breaking off engagements so tactfully that it seemed as if it wasn’t her idea at all, but yours. Weeks would pass before it occurred to you that you’d been dumped. Always she claimed to have done it for your own good, that her lowly origins would harm you socially, that the source of her wealth (her stepfather’s casino) would taint you politically, that her lack of a diploma would cause your intellectual friends to shun you both. We called her The Noble Bolter.

We were discussing her at the Harvard Club one afternoon and came up with the idea of hiring someone to exact revenge for us. We decided that Callison was the perfect man for the job. A recent graduate with tons of student debt, he had bundles of charm and rugged good looks that women found irresistible. We offered him $20,000 – half up front; half when the job was done. He was wary of the idea, but eventually we brought him on board.

We began inviting him to various social functions, where we would hint vaguely that he was connected to this or that great fortune on his mother’s side, that he was a shoo-in for some coveted government appointment, that he had friends in high places. Naturally, all this talk caught the attention of The Noble Bolter.

Soon the two of them were inseparable. In October, they announced their intention to marry the following July. We decided that April 1st should be the day that Callison jilted her. But he resisted the idea. You might say he had gotten warm feet. “I dunno, fellas,” he said, “I think I’ve really fallen for her.” We laughed at this. “When she finds out that you’re a penniless fraud,” we told him, “she’ll drop you like an autumn leaf. You may as well beat her to the punch and collect your ten grand.” Eventually we got him to see reason.

We wired his apartment for sound so that we jiltees could listen in while he did to her what she’d done to us. But it didn’t work out that way. As we listened in mute horror, he asked her to elope with him, to run out that night and get married by a justice of the peace in Atlantic City. Amazingly, she agreed. Before we could race over to his apartment and expose him as a fraud, they were gone.

Of course, we all knew it was only a matter of time before he’d join us in the Jiltees Club. We waited and we watched. When their son was born, we all thought: How tragic it will be when mom runs off to Bolivia with some surf bum and leaves Callison to raise the kid alone. Their second child, a daughter, looked so much like her mother we feared that someday the resemblance would come to haunt a lonely and abandoned Callison.

At their silver anniversary party, we thought it would be just like the Noble Bolter to use the occasion to announce her decision to end the marriage before it could grow old and stale and become a source of anguish for them both. It was exactly the kind of thing she’d do.

A few years later, after she’d been felled by cancer, we sat together at the back of the church and watched while Callison, flanked by his four children, wept bitterly before her casket. We couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. If only he’d listened to us, we thought. We could have spared him so much pain.