Some people say the love you put into baking shows in the product. I am not entirely sure what that love looks like as an ingredient and what it tastes like coming out of the oven. It is almost as abstract or obscure as my first yoga teacher telling us to breathe into a certain part of our body, the part is experiencing the difficulty of a posture at the moment. Sometimes things are too poetic for me when I just need to know what concrete steps I should be taking.
However, when I am rushing during baking, that's when I get a good sense of what that love is. And it starts to make sense.
When I am rushing, I tend to make mistakes. Wrong ingredients, or wrong sequence of steps, or wrong quantity. Wrong something. Forgot to let the butter sit out? Or too long. The oven is not on yet, or I haven't removed the cookware inside.
That's when I am rushing. I am not so attentive. I don't pay attention to details. And I am less aware of what I am doing in the kitchen. There isn't a picture of me being in the kitchen. There's just hopping from one corner to the next to get something done. And just like everything else in life, love diminishes when there isn't a soul to the action. So that's probably the ingredient they are talking about: attentiveness and awareness to myself as part of an environment, especially to the thing I am taking care of.
The outcome, well, from a rational point of view, when the ingredient is love, then most likely the outcome is something beautiful, tasty just because you have done everything perfect. It will be as good as the recipe demands, and if you have experience baking, the love you put in my alter the recipe a bit so that the outcome is even better than what the recipe demands.
I was rushing this past Saturday morning when I wanted to make a rum pound cake. It's a simple cake, but I managed to add the eggs before the sugar into the beaten butter. It's obvious that sugar goes right after the butter; I have done it so many times. But I was rushing. I wasn't paying attention. The love was somewhere else, not in the kitchen. It came out all right. But even if it didn't really matter in the end, I still regretted it. Baking needs to be like everything else I enjoy: given the time and attention.
I gave away three pieces, in addition to feeding one to my art buddy who was with me this weekend. I gave the first piece to the guy the French girl is dating. I wasn't sure if that was a good idea; I wasn't sure why I did it; and I am not sure if I should regret it. I don't want to be close to him. As I've mentioned in past blogs, he would have been someone important in my New York life if none of this drama had happened. If the French girl had dated someone else, I would have been hurt, though not as much, and I would probably have confided my pain to him, and he probably would have shared his thoughts from having seen undoubtedly more drama in his longer experience as a tango dancer.
But that's all in the would-haves. He is now a driving force in my sadness, my anguish, and although he supposedly didn't know anything about it, and although I might ignore the reality that he doesn't make it all quiet in front of me, I find it difficult to trust him, and probably impossible to forgive him. But there's a part of me that remembers the days when he came to New Haven to teach and would be very excited to have my sweets. He would tell the class to eat what I brought in because he would be tempted to eat it all. What is that part? Some nostalgia. Some sorrow for an innocent past. But memories are not just the sweet, innocent ones. I remember that in the same classroom how he had already started flirting with her. I was anxious for the day that things actually would happen between them. And that day had come and the saga, what it feels to be a saga, still continues.
To give him a cake just two days after I found out he was going to Berlin the same time as she was is too strange. And I don't want him to get the wrong impression that things are all right for the two of us. Even after their saga ends, I can't imagine the damage would be repaired easily. He and I were never that close, no more than a casual tango relationship.
But I brought him a piece of cake, in any case. Perhaps to thank him for having helped me with adjusting to my new life, for giving me music whenever I wanted, although I never abused that. The French girl says he "loves" me; I don't think she understands what that word means, not enough to know he isn't someone who loves in the way I love to bake.
At the end he offered to give me a ride. He warned and I knew that because I would have to wait until everything was cleaned up and taken care of at the end of the milonga, I wasn't going to save much time in comparison to taking the subway. Why did I consent? Because I don't like saying "no". Because I wanted to be a man about everything and not show resentment. But not because I wanted to bond with him. Not because I want to consider the possibility of forgiving him. I wouldn't have felt worse if I had declined. I only hope he doesn't think I have opened up to him more, especially now that the French girl isn't standing between us, for now. I didn't forget about Berlin. I didn't forget the humiliation.
All this would pass. And the fire that the drama those two had burned across my world will be extinguished one day, soon. For now, I give him a cake but not my forgiveness.
I gave the second piece to my favorite dancer there. We dance well together. We look great together, as people have commented. And she feels great. We also make jokes together while waiting for the next song. We are both Asians so we have an additional connection. But we never spent time outside tango. I guess it's because she's married and older than me, so if I don't show interest in spending time, a married person with her busy married life would not be expected to take the initiative. But she's a good person. She plays a small but significant role in bringing me smiles in New York, especially in this milonga where before I even moved to New York I have had trouble smiling.
The third piece of cake was given to the pianist. The one with whom I shared an evening of great conversation with. She was the main reason I came to the milonga at all. Otherwise I would have completely the entire week free of tango. She was surprised I had cakes for her. She enjoyed it but didn't show a lot of emotion until later in an email. We danced. I realized I liked very much holding her. She's not the greatest dancer, and I much more enjoy dancing with the woman I mentioned above. But when you're attracted to someone, the feeling is different and the technique doesn't matter so much. I complimented her eyes, which embarrassed her, but this time, unlike other times I embarrassed someone with compliments, I was unapologetic. I stood firm with my compliment.
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