Baking
baking
Company Picnic
Baking
Baking 2020
Four-times-milled poppy seeds for makowiec. A little boy who couldn’t get enough of the cookie cutter. A daughter who made cookies with chocolate chips and crushed candy canes (they are as sublimely amazing as they sound). A Polish mother overseeing and guiding it all — who are we kidding? Doing most of the magic.
It’s getting close to Christmas.
Day 7: Sunday
With the diocese of Charleston making the decision to close all churches in the current emergency, today had a different feel from most Sundays and a somewhat different feel from the previous six days.
Previous six days? Has this only been going on a week? It was indeed a week ago that we learned the governor of South Carolina was closing all schools for the rest of the month, but I swear it feels like that was weeks ago. I know it’s been going on for several months now with the original outbreak in China, and while I’m tempted to go on a rant here about how much time we wasted between that initial outbreak in China and even a week ago when everything started shutting down all because our narcissistic shallow president views everything as if it’s about him and went so far as to call the pandemic a hoax at one of his rallies and still behaves as if this will all blow over because he’s now taking it seriously and pretending to put some resources into it — no, I’ll resist that urge and simply point out that it feels like it’s been longer than a week.
First, there was no church — no Mass at a church, that is. Second, there was church — something like it, a series of readings and a recorded homily that Kinga, the kids, and Papa did while I was out taking the dog for a walk. It just didn’t feel like a Sunday.
Is it possible that someone could look at this and understand how much exponentially worse it could get with a different virus with, say, a 60% death rate and understand that something like that could very well lurking in our future and still, understanding that a belief in God would necessitate an acceptance that God would have also created such a virus, it would have been in his plan, part of his mysterious ways — could someone hold all this in their head and still believe in a benevolent god? Thinking how relatively mild this is compared to what could be or even has been makes it all but impossible for me.
Another change: we got a new hot water heater installed today. We’ve been wanting to do it for some time, and I’ve had a feeling that our old heater was going to malfunction any day. The guys who did the installation for us — the guys who did the renovation of the carport, turning it into Papa’s room — were going to come next week, but with so much uncertainty, they decided to come today. We’re expecting a significant drop in our power bill as this was our last power-hungry appliance/system in our house. Changing the HVAC system cut our power bill by 30-50% (depending on the usage); this change should result in additional significant savings considering the heater dates from 1992 — the year after I graduated from high school.
Why am I so negative about all this? Why do I see only gray to any silver lining? It’s my eternal battle.
In the afternoon, the kids and I went out in the backyard to — guess — shoot. The dog does not like when we shoot as she gets stuck up on the deck for her own good…
E and I have figured out that if we fire toward something a little bit darker than the surrounding area, we can actually follow the flight of the bb, so we’ve taken to firing into the forest behind our neighbor’s house on occasion. We’ve also been trying to shoot from various positions in the yard, all of them significantly farther away from where we normally shoot. And we still take shots at the dog’s fetch ball because, well, why not?
After shooting, the Girl decided to bake a cake. The aesthetics were something like I would produce, but that comes with time. The taste is all that matters, and I think we all agreed: it was delicious.
Random day, random thoughts.
Goodies for the Teachers
The chocolate treats we sent L’s teachers were such a hit we decided to do the same for E’s teachers. And when I say “we” in that sentence, I mean K.
First Nudges to Perfection
It’s one of the ironies we seem never really to pay attention to, but we’re always aiming at perfection. Granted, the apathetic eighth-grader’s bar is significantly lower than many adults’, but there exists for even the most uninspired a standard, despite his protests to the contrary.
Perhaps there’s even an element of national identity in this. I know from experience that the average Pole’s definition of “perfectly clean” is several steps above my own. And my own definition is several degrees more severe than the Girl’s, whose idea of cleaning up consists of stacking everything that was on the floor into piles on the two tables — one ostensibly for drawing and reading, the other for playing — in her room. And so yesterday, we began our first nudges to the perfection implicit in Wigilia (the traditional Polish Christmas Eve meal) by cleaning the Girl’s room.
The Boy, in the meantime, cooed and cackled as he played with one of L’s old toys, oblivious to the Girl’s struggle, yet to be completed, against chaos. His standard for perfection is at the most elementary level: clean diaper, rested soul, full belly. Any one of those three perfections drop out of alignment and we all know about it. It’s really very simple, though. There’s no guessing, no games. No misleading. No implication. He cries and we do two things: sniff and look at the clock.
It’s all about the little steps to perfection, the little steps that often leave a bit of a mess. Like in the Girl’s mouth.
“Tata, my new tooth still hasn’t begun to grow,” she bemoaned yesterday. It takes time, like any perfecting, but what can I tell her? I don’t remember how long it took for my own teeth to grow back, and since she’s the oldest in the family, there’s no familial metric. Still, reassurances were in order.
“It will take time,” was about the only thing one could say. Not nearly as much time as the other things in life you’ll try to perfect: your temper (still working on mine); your restlessness when bored (ditto); your frustration when things don’t work as you think they should (hey, did you inherit all my flaws?).
“Certainly my impatience costs me,” I thought to myself leaving L to more cleaning. Just the other day, I’d rushed to mulch the leaves in the lower portion of our backyard before going through and checking for hazards. The result was mind- and blade-bending. And so today, before I could really even begin much of anything on my list, I went to a big box hardware to get a replacement.
The girls, though, had other duties. It seems the twenty-second is baking day in our house. It was, at least, last year — to the day — and it was probably the same day the year before and the year before that. I was just probably too lazy to write about it. Or perhaps, looking for perfection, I wanted to write about something new. “Who wants to write about the same thing every year?” I might have muttered. But those cycles are, themselves, somehow signals of perfection, concentric circles that bear down on perhaps the perfect sugar cookie.
The Girl’s skills, certainly, are improving. Coupled with her imagination, she often creates things that leave me astounded. Her cookies today, for instance, are portraits.
“That’s me,” she says, pointing to the smiling cookie with chocolate hair. “That’s H,” she says, pointing to the cooking with dirty-walnut blond hair, referring to the daughter of our sitter. “And that’s W,” she says of the little boy cookie with a tuft of blond nuts.
The Boy, meanwhile, spent the evening working on perfecting locomotion. At twenty-five pounds, he’s a very heavy seven-month-old, and we’ve wondered if his arms will be up to the challenge of holding up that amount of weight. Tonight, he improvised a bit of locomotion, pushing with his toes and wiggling his body as he supported as much of himself as possible on his elbows. Nudges toward crawling. Nudges toward walking. Nudges toward independence. It starts so early, and before I know it, he too will be informing me of things that are inappropriate, as the Girl likes to do; suggesting that hisideas are really, in fact, better than mine, as the Girl is beginning to do.
Still, for now, I’m boss. When I say, “time for bed,” it is. I still make reality with my words. For now.
I end my evening with its own little bit of perfection, including Zimmerman’s performance of Chopin’s four ballades, but most especially his “Ballade No. 2.”
Perfection, and due to the fact that Zimmerman can play this again and again, without missing a single not, without a flaw of any kind, it is true perfection, not just some euphemism for “very, very good.”