Wasted All Our Twenties Chasing Down a Dream

I'm going to start this one with a disclaimer. You know you are. If you really want it to be a surprise, you'd best wait to read this. Maybe give me a call instead and I'll tell you a story and you can make me laugh. Then maybe read this next week sometime when both of us have our hands full.

There's an event tomorrow. Apparently, we're all supposed to cook. I always understand that assignment, so I'm going to tell you a little story about how this particular creation came to be.

Of course it's always a Nanny story right now. Any time I bake, I do it with at least one person in my heart. There's no convincing me that it doesn't help it taste better if you hold a direct love while you bake. She loved chocolate. She would tell us how when her brother, Lonnie, came home from the Navy, he'd bring her a chocolate bar. She absolutely adored him. You could hear it in the way she said his name. She had the ability to show how much she loved someone by the way she said their name. It was always a quiet amazement to me.

They were poor back then. She was born in 1927 to an Irish police officer named Jim Conner (yeah, we are a whole stereotype) and a Scottish midwife born Orlena Gibson. When she was just shy of a year old, her father was shot by friendly fire in what equates to civil rights riot. So in 1928, her mother was left single with two daughters to raise, aged almost one and two. And she fucking did it. I come from a long line of women with steel bones.

Nanny talked about trading eggs for oranges. She explained the man like some sort of tinker, with a cart and they'd have things repaired and trade. She would always talk about Lonnie in the same conversation. It never occurred to me to ask why until right now and I can't. She had a mind for stories that never let go. Her details never faded or disappeared. She could put you in the moment she lived. Maybe that's what I can do, except in print. I'd like to think that.

So she would tell this story of her brother and his chocolate bars. And she could make you believe that she loved chocolate in a Pavlovian way. She loved Lonnie and Lonnie came with chocolate and so she loved chocolate because she loved him so deeply. And then he died. But she still had chocolate.

I guess I spent my life chasing the next best chocolate so I could keep hearing her stories and keep seeing her face illuminate with the love she'd lost. For a moment, she got him back every time she tasted something she loved in chocolate form. And I guess now, I get her back every time I bake something chocolate.

Her favorite was my triple chocolate cheesecake. That thing is decadent. So rich, you only eat a little sliver or you end up with immedibetes. She loved it. She requested it a few times and she made so few requests. I suppose I'll make that for Christmas and cry the whole time. I don't think I could do anything else.

I've always loved good chocolate cake. And I have searched and planned and questioned and experimented until I created the perfect chocolate cake. I don't believe I've ever tasted better. I've tinkered with the original recipe until I can't improve it. My company president knows who I am because of that cake. I have no interest in being known. If they don't know you, they can't be mad at you. A catholic with sweet tooth you would not believe. The first time I took it to work, I had the whole company in my email asking for the recipe and how long I've baked and a thousand other things. Food brings people together.

And I baked that today. And I dare say I may have outdone myself. It's an easy recipe, it really is. It bakes up light and airy and still somehow rich and fudgy. A splash of coffee makes chocolate better every time. A little extra salt in that frosting and a mix of milk chocolate and chocolate so dark it shatters into little knives, almost black, when you break it and the tiny shrapnel is the only thing that shows its real color.

No one has ever complained about that cake. 

I got to this point and my phone rang. It didn't take him long to ask me to tell him a story and it didn't take long for him to make me laugh. I guess I manifested that conversation. And I enjoyed it immensely. Music. I'm eventually going to ask him how deep in Tom T. Hall he really is. I suspect the answer is "very" but I don't want to be presumptuous. I went to bed without finishing this so I'll pick back up.

I made that chocolate cake last Christmas. Nanny loved Christmas. Honestly, by then her appetite had started to wane slightly and she would say she didn't really care for chocolate anymore. This woman who would hoard a box of chocolate like some sort of confectionary dragon didn't like chocolate anymore. Gabe told me that and I'm sure I stood there in disbelief. But she ate a few bites of that cake.  I guess that was the last time I baked for her. That may also have been the last time I baked this cake. I guess baking this cake and sharing it with people I care about is my version of bringing her back to me the same way that chocolate always brought her brother and her love for him back to her. I love her and I love chocolate so much because she did. I don't have her anymore, but I still have chocolate.