The Moment with Muffins

I'm in the cooking phase. I leaf through magazines, contemplate "healthy-food" recipes, get excited, and try to approximate the look and the alleged taste of the dish in question (glossy and perfect in the photograph). I follow the recipes conservatively, and am often content with the end result (although it is never glossy and perfect).

Some days ago I set my sights on The Almond Blueberry Tea Cake, and armed myself with good intentions, mediocre skills, and the paltry tools that my kitchen offers. The counter, my hands, and sizeable areas of my clothes were sprinkled with almond and spelt flour, the tips of my fingers got sticky with honey, the egg-white had dripped, gelatinously, down the side of the cup -- but I finally had it, the batter, and it looked and smelled (approximately) good. I triumphantly half-filled my disposable 6-cup muffin pan, garnished each muffin-to-be with exactly 4 fresh blueberries, stuck everything into the infernal 350F of the indifferent oven, closed the door, and...

... clicked my tongue. A succulent, juicy, fat suction sound, like this, tssssssss. Just like my mother and her mother used to do whenever anything that needed rising went into the oven. A small good-luck charm, a "blessing," a magic spell, working its wonders with dough without a fail, better than any baking powder or yeast. You laughed at it, you shook your head in gentle rebuke, but you never questioned this folk fact, you just did it.

I crouched by the oven, sat down on my heels, and observed the minute tremblings of the muffin mass exposed to high temperature. And then, for an infinitesimal moment, I was intensely alone, sitting there, watching my muffins through the oven door, my mother and her mother gone, and my only link to the world a small tssss.

Then Zare strolled over, cautiously sniffed at the glass panel of the oven generating waves of heat, and settled down next to me, his tail silently sweeping the floor. 18 minutes later, we took the muffins out, and just before they began to sag a little at the room temperature, they stood there, steaming, and big, and perfect.

Choking on a Cherry

While you were choking on a cherry,
In the middle of a dappled country road,
I was twelve, and terrified
And stood at a distance, like
A block of stone, watching
The woman we were visiting
Pound your bent back with urgency.

(Grandmother told me how one summer
You almost choked on a teaspoonful
Of honey trickling slowly down your
Baby throat, and all she could do was
Watch)

When the cherry was propelled out
And you breathed back into life,
I too was catapulted from the
Dark nether regions of possible
Childhood tragedies into a fairly
Standard untraumatized adolescence,
Ushered in by a breath of relief –

Relief which, in retrospect, was only
Stalling for time, and blew up into
Smithereens, dispersed forever
When, twenty years later, I received
The news of your death, final
And irreversible, holding no
Hidden last-minute reprieves.