For my mom...

Memory Unequaled

Emotion overcomes me at strange times.  I can spend hours with my mother who no longer knows me and maintain composure even as I watch her close her eye to spare herself the sight of me, the sight that signals to her on some level that she should know this face opposite her.  Rather than look intently and be puzzled, she peeks—one eye open—tries to place me but can’t, closes her eye again, breathes deeply and mutters what sounds in rhythm and tone like a prayer under her breath.  What is she praying for?  I like to think she is praying for a concept she can sense but no longer articulate, peace of mind, but I can’t be sure. 

Weeks later, having thought of her often with a sweeping sadness yet unconsummated by tears (I have shed so many for her over the last 7 years I sometimes feel they have dried into an invisible armor), I am searching my baking cabinet for yeast.  I want to bake a cake:  a Bienenstich, or “bee sting” cake.  I need instant yeast, which I never use, and I’m struck with the thought that I might have a packet that my neighbor gave me several months ago.  All of my mind’s recipes called for the reliable jar of active-dry yeast I kept in the fridge, not instant, and I wasn’t sure what I had done with the packet or if I’d kept it at all.  But this is a new cake, and I am determined: it is spring’s eve, and the chirps, buzzes, and breezy warmth wavering from screen window through screen door are inspiring. Topped with honey-caramelized almonds and filled with a fluffy pale yellow pastry cream, this cake seems perfectly fitting. 

So here I am on my stepstool searching, reaching, and reorganizing my baking cabinet in hopes of finding that tiny platinum packet of instant yeast.  I finally spot it in the back left corner between crumpled packets of Equal, the sugar substitute I also never use.  Equal. I’m instantly overcome with a sinking nausea and a rising lump in my throat as a vision appears: two torn beige-stained packets of Equal weighted by a used spoon adjacent a lipstick-smudged half-empty mug of lukewarm coffee resting on an oak veneer table.  This is the breakfast table on any busy morning of my childhood and this is my mom’s coffee: one and a half packs of Equal with plenty of half and half, fat free.  On the heels of this vision is the memory of countless quiet morning rides to Catholic school in the chartreuse green interior of the white-walled Pontiac Bonneville where her coffee mug rested on the dashboard, tilting slightly back and forming an egg-shaped cloud of steam on the windshield between her and me.  

She is the reason those Equal packets are still in my cabinet. I’d kept them when we remodeled the kitchen a few years ago.  The last time she was in my house and still knew how to fix her coffee the way she liked it had been years before that. And yet here they are: envelopes of a sugar substitute I loathe reminding me of the first thing on this earth I ever truly loved, my mother.  Tiny blue packets of Equal arousing mighty memories and stinging tears, tears I thought I’d long since forgotten how to shed.