Birthday cheesecake, 12/12/05 (photo shard)

I carry shards.

We are lucky in that I am the keeper of the images. Our words, well, they have been mostly the victim of the fire sales we went through in the summer and fall of '06, but the photos, least ways, in the form of negatives, still remain whole and complete and untouched. I have to wonder what would have happened to them if they had been stored in a memory chip, or tucked away in computer data files, or anything else other than that old fashioned form of image banking. Yes, thank goodness for those pocket snapshots.

But our photos. I was not kind to those photos. That night, the 27th of September, the evening after my Dungeness slog, I can reasonably say that I was not a happy man. I was a roiling ball of tempestous passion. Fury unabated. I tossed my beloved bathroom frog into the maw of the Yew, rampaged through our Calcopo files and deleted them all out of Yahoo, tore our bookclub books asunder and ripped each and every photo into very interestingly shaped shards. The passion spent, all pieces and garbage and such were tipped into the trash. All told it had to be the worst night of my life.

Come the next day, those torn pieces of paper were suddenly artifacts, pieces of a lost civilization, chunks and bits and slivers of a life fully loved but half lived. I found that most of the pieces would be meaningless to even the most resolute of detectives, but then, an uncanny thing happened: somehow I seemed to magically tear those photos on angles that salvaged your face. Over and over again I found myself out of the picture, but you remained. Even the Apple Cup photo that you passed along to me somehow escaped my wrath, and your face remained. How nice for me, how great for puzzle assemblers like yourself.

So, because I am the keeper of the images I get to pour over those fragments now and again. I promised myself that I wouldn't do it again anytime soon, as this process of writing about our life is working it's magic and I don't want to mess with the subtlty of it all. But in the midst of those shards one fragment remains: of a shot of my kitchen table, candles aglow, cheesecake and presents and all that holiday wonderfulness spread about it, in anticipation of your arrival. It was taken right after you came in my back door, eyes shielded by a handkerchief or kitchen towel, or possibly my hands. As icons go, it was something way up there, akin to those poems never written, to have a man not only surprise you with flowers and gifts, but to set a table for you with a cheesecake freshly made for you to honor your day.

See, I was a complete and total devotee of yours, and that cake was truly a supreme monument to the act of complete and total surrender. Love is a funny thing. We go out of our way to express ourselves in ways that we normally never would. Up to that moment baking was not my forte. I was not a recipe follower, a pastry man, a baker of any sort outside of Toll house cookies, an occasional loaf of bread and boxed cake mixes. But there I was, only months into our friendship, deep into the realm of cheesecake recipe experimentation. And the funny thing? I truly fell in love with it.

That love of ours completely spilled over into real life. One passion became the poster child for another. What was a gift to you suddenly turned on itself and boomerranged back into my heart: it was the gift that kept on giving. That one gesture, the sweet, simple gift of a baked good made by my own hands for you on your birthday suddenly became the finest thing I've taken on in my life: cooking for the greater good. Cooking as a way to express my feelings for something other than hunger pangs. Cooking for for sake of sharing something wonderful with the ones I love.

It became an art and you, my dear, were my muse. I took that cheesecake thing deep into the year, far past your birthday, right up to holiday parties and family events and staff get-togethers. Whereever I go with a cheesecake, there you are.

And I have that shard of a birthday celebration, of your birthday, in that packet, stuck in my satchel, to prove it.

Happy 45th Birthday to you, M, muse and love of my life.

Your WHMB