It's is like a perpetual leap of faith, going home-made. You know there's always a risk; something's always liable to go wrong. You just never know exactly what or when.
"Oh my aching back," my grandmother called out from downstairs.
I was only eleven and still a little dense to my grandparents' folksy, depression-era expressions. I thought she'd popped a spinal disc, or maybe backed into the kitchen counter-corner and stabbed herself in the kidney, or maybe she'd had an aching back since last week and was no longer interested in keeping it a private matter.
In the cabin where this took place, you had your downstairs, which served for your standard Minnesotans, who wanted to talk things over about the deer and woodticks and the horsepower of certain outboard motors, and maybe play some scrabble. And then for us young barbarians, you had your loft. Well, up I lay in the loft, possibly reading Isaiah, but more likely practicing burping. However, out of concern and curiosity about my grandmother's lumbar regions, I descended to investigate. The air smelled of melted plastics. It also smelled of bread, but in a way that mixed the sweetness of dough with the charred scent of toast.
The good lady stood in the kitchen, looking forlornly into the oven. Just behind her, commiserating in silence, stood my grandfather.
"So much for the rolls," she said.
It was one of those old gas ovens, with the perpetual pilot lights. My mother (back home) loved hers. She used the draftless oven space for defrosting frozen berries, frozen corn, and frozen green beans. Or she'd take a bowl of yogurt-to-be and set it in there to gel. Or maybe after kneading the bread dough, she'd make use of said oven as a space for getting the dough to rise. See, the pilot light kept the inside of the oven just warm enough to encourage civilizations of yeast cells within the dough to rise to a kind of superb literacy of flatulence (much like the boy upstairs in the loft). This idealized cultural space reduced rising-time by a third to a half. Plus you could look in through the oven window and see whether the belly of the dough-ball had doubled in size inside its bowl. Was it touching the underside of the damp linen cloth that you had placed over the doughball to keep it moist? Well, when that linen was looking good and maternal--that was about when you'd take it out and shape it into loaves or buns and proceed.
Here's the thing, though: if ever you used the oven space for rising the bread, remember this: you were never but never but NEVER to preheat the oven (while the dough still in there) for anything else!
Just ask my grandmother and her aching back.
A pond of melted plastic (formerly the bowl for the dough) lay on the floor of the oven. Bread dough lay all over the oven racks, in grotesque foamy lumps baked in with a green dishtowel. And to round out the outrage of the incident by means of contrary comparison, there on the kitchen counter-top, in supreme ignorance of the disaster, lay two pans of lovely acorn squashes ready for roasting, the squashes neatly cut in half. Oh the proud little boats of them, with their bright orange passenger-spaces all sprinkled with brown sugar!
Watson what happened here? Well clearly sir, the perpetrator placed her dough-victim into the unlit oven, covering said victim with the damp linen. Then, in her industrious eagerness to get the squash roasting for lunch, she preheated the oven, forgetting however to remove the bowl of dough...
Case closed. Though I ought to add that for lunch that afternoon (served unusually late) we ate the squashes and whatever else there was to eat all pretty much in silence. Clearly my grandmother did not want to talk any of this over. Please note as well, that no one had gone into Hackensack to the grocery for buns. This would have been tacky in the extreme, an insult to my grandmother. After all we were all family. If she was suffering, why shouldn't we all suffer with her? That's what being family means.
Now last Tuesday, I wrote about nine-volt strategies for dealing with the occasional tough curves that circumstance can throw our way. But what about those moments when we ourselves have made the mess? And made the mess in part because we chose to do things the hard way? Making our own lunch say? Doing our own baking by hand? Trying to hang the darn door ourselves, with a few tools and a Reader's Digest handbook for home repair?
The answer is there's not much to do in such moments of despair, beyond just grit your teeth. Just bear it. Convince yourself you will not die, which you probably won't. Remind yourself that at worst, your grandson years from now will tell the saga of your blunder to utter strangers all across the world on some world-wide network of computers.
Maybe in such moments of failure, it helps to remind yourself that failure happens to everyone, and even to those with a huge amount of experience. My grandmother for instance, by the day of the baking accident had raised five children, seen them married off and have children of their own, then watched those children grow into adolescence as well. All that time she'd been baking and cooking. Yet in spite of all that experience she'd managed that day to make an elementary mistake, and her embarrassment and displeasure were extreme. She was a child of the depression after all, and here she had destroyed a nice durable plastic bowl, as well as put the kibosh on the existence of two dozen rolls, and made a mess of her oven to boot.
And yet life goes on. You clean up and move on. Which in my grandmother's case, on that particular day, meant you get the acorn squashes into the oven and the remainder of the meal ready, and serve it.
There was something just a little heroic about my grandmother at lunch that day: her fortitude and dignity. And something exactly appropriate about everyone's silence too, around the table, regarding the events of the previous two hours. It was as if the principal cellist of the orchestra had just flubbed an important solo, and this was aftermath and the concert was over and there she is coming out of the hall case in-hand, the experience of genuine bummer-hood on her face; look she looks as if she's just been in a bus accident, in which no one was hurt but everyone was shaken. Well so if you count yourself as her friend, you keep your trap shut. Maybe open the door for her. But let her go on her way in silence...
HB
(Until Tuesday the 19th!)
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