Toast

I made toast tonight and cried. I buttered 6 pieces of bread, two pieces for me, and four extras.  My children said they didn’t want any. But, I knew that when they saw me eating they would gawk until I gave them a bite. When I plopped jelly on the warm toast, I began to cry. I kept my face hidden; my children would not understand why mommy cries while she eats toast.

Some people like to toast the bread before applying the butter. However, the indisputable truth is that to get perfect toast, you have to apply the butter before toasting. I emphasize 'before' to help you avoid a couple of major problems.

The biggest problem with the toast-first method is that the butter does not merge into oneness with the bread. It simply lays on the surface. How much butter to use is a personal choice, however, if you notice an oil spot on your cookie sheet, you are approaching perfect buttering. The other problem is purely aesthetical; however, it merits discussion. When you apply butter to a well- browned, crunchy top layer, you have something that resembles a blended giraffe. I don't know about you, but I've never been inspired to eat giraffes.

I let my toast set on a plate to cool for about seventy eight seconds. Which, amazingly enough, is just the amount of time I need to survey the jelly inventory in my fridge. If you try to put the jelly on before the toast has “set,” you end up with an ugly hole.

            For several years I didn’t make toast. Now that my taste for toast has been revived, I can’t imagine life without it. I searched my soul to figure out why I would deliberately exclude toast from my life. Finally, I realized why I hadn’t been making toast. I did not want to be like my mother. For her, toast was a divinely-inspired, 100 percent, nutritionally-complete meal.

             My mother was a door-mat in relationship to my father. After I became a mother, I began to remember something else though.  There was the time when my father went on an all-veggie-guru-eastern diet, which included tofu and daily chanting to Hare Krishna. During that trend, my mother continued to cook her deep-fried foods. He learned to cook rice. One day, after several hours of transcendental chanting, he emerged from the basement and delivered the eleventh commandment: “No more white bread or refined sugar."  But, there was the toast. Pure, simple, toast--made from white bread. It made a statement just sitting on the plate. “I will not be pushed around by your religious whims or your Timothy Leary approach to the universe!”          

She was a simple southern woman, the youngest of 5, and raised during the depression. The first ones to the table got the choicest pieces of meat and bread. She got the leftovers. Her routine consumption of burnt biscuits created a preference for 'blackened biscuits.' She vowed not to pass on her preference, hence, the toast.

My mother doesn’t eat toast very often these days. In fact, she doesn’t eat much of anything the nursing home serves. Last Friday, the nurses asked me if I was going to “let her go naturally’ or choose the tube feeding route. Instinctively, I knew that she would not want to exist if she could not chew her own food. I cried tonight, because I don’t think she’ll be eating anymore toast in this life.

My mother had no idea the respect her toast-making would create. I can still hear her pulling the cookie sheet out of the oven. Thanks mom, for teaching me to make toast.