A customer came into Barnes & Noble today, Halloween. She looked awkward and bookish, a 20-something woman with dyed black hair in pig tails and barrettes like a six-year old girl, white knee high tube socks with red stripes at the top, and tape on her glasses. She came to the register and was practically vibrating with excitement about the brand new Danielle Steel book, her favorite author, and I thought she might cry when she found out she was 36 cents short of being able to purchase the second Steel title she was hoping to buy. As I interacted with her, checking out the masking tape wrapped around the bridge of her purple Buddy Holly glasses, totally in love with her because she was spending her last pennies on books, I honestly could not tell if she was in costume for Halloween, or if she was truly this great of a character. That’s what I love about bookish types. You never can tell.
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Growing up on the coast of Georgia, I’m no stranger to hurricanes. And after three years in Minnesota, I’ve become acquainted with snow as well. But a hurricane with snow? That I’ve never seen.
Last night, as I lay in bed listening to the roaring wind, worried like I was during this summer’s derecho that the trees around here are too big and inflexible for a tempest like this, I couldn’t help but compare the wind through these noble giants with one of my most stirring memories, of palm trees in a hurricane. You see, my birthday is in early September – smack dab in the peak of hurricane season – and it seems that almost every year, around my birthday, we were all glued to the radio or TV, either watching a hurricane that, thankfully, wasn’t tracking towards us, or on pins and needles for the next trajectory update, wondering if we would need to evacuate. I remember Hugo in 1989 barreling towards my parents home on Tybee Island, and me trying to help my dad hammer plywood over their plate glass windows that faced the sea. I was 15 that year.
But my most vivid, and strangely, fondest birthday-hurricane memory is of Hurricane David. 1979. My fifth birthday. When we actually did evacuate. We lived on St. Simon’s Island at the time, and I don’t remember any of the preparations, any of the worry, any of the stress that my parents must have felt, watching a category 5 hurricane make its way directly towards their island home. They had an eight-year-old and a four-year-old, and their four-year-old was supposed to be having a birthday. I don’t remember the fleeing, or even where we went (maybe two hours north to Savannah, which I think bore more of the brunt of David than St. Simon’s did). What I do remember, though, besides not having a birthday cake, is watching out the window of the motel room we finally settled in when the driving became too dangerous. The storm didn’t scare me then – I had none of the grown-up worries that a hurricane brings – and I was fascinated by the palm trees out the window, and how far they could bend. The room was dark, and rain slashed in diagonal sheets outside that rectangle of a picture window, and the palm trees bowed like yogis in a back bend, their mops of hair whipping in the wind.
It’s that image – of being in a dark motel room, with forest green and burgundy bed spreads, our source of light being the rectangle of window framing the slate gray stormscape, and me being entranced by the slashing rain and crescent palm trees – that has imprinted itself indelibly in my memory, and that I forever associate with hurricanes.
What’s funny to me is that our kids’ hurricane memories are going to be so polar opposite of mine. Instead of a tropical storm with palm trees, their earliest hurricane memory is going to be in the mountains, from an Appalachian Halloween Frankenstorm with freezing temperatures, and that they played in the wind and snow of. From Hurricane Sandy, who swooped in after a marathon weekend of raking leaves from 80 foot tall deciduous trees. After three years and multiple blizzards in Minnesota, where they never once had a snow day, with Sandy they got a day off of school for a hurricane that made landfall in the northeast, hundreds of miles from home.
But what might be most memorable to them is that since it was only October and I hadn’t yet stocked up on hot cocoa mix (I thought we left October snow behind when we moved away from Minnesota!), they got a taste for real, homemade, from scratch hot chocolate that, thanks to a barrage of helpful tips on Facebook, I was able to make with the cocoa and sugar and milk that I did have. When they came in from the snow, rosy cheeked and panting, and I offered them hot chocolate, their bright eyes and smiles could have lit up New York City. I hope their earliest hurricane memories will be as fond, and exciting, and unforgettable as mine.
I have had the good fortune of never being directly hit by a hurricane, and so I have the luxury of having fond and exciting, and safe, memories. My heart goes out to all of the Hurricane victims, past and present who do not have that luxury. My prayers are with you.
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We finally made it to Gobble Cakes! That’s Blacksburg’s brand new cupcakery, and oh my god, y’all, it was all I could have hoped for. Cupcakes piled high with piped whipped frostings, elegant personal-sized confections on silver cake plates, ten flavors to choose from, and me standing there for fifteen minutes trying to decide between them.
The kids and I became huge fans of Food Network’s Cupcake Wars this summer. We watched bakers create and decorate cupcakes for Star Wars, Hotel Transylvania, Angry Birds, Tim Burton. We watched the show so often that the kids knew what the judges liked, which cake formulas would work, and when bakers were going down. Our eight year old son would say, “Oh, not an apple cake! Those never rise.” Or a novice who obviously hadn’t watched as many episodes as we have would feed the judges a traditional red velvet cake and our six year old daughter would say, “Uh oh. Florian’s not going to like that. He’s sick of red velvet.”
The show inspired us to make our own cupcakes, and we experimented with chocolate orange cakes and these peanut butter chocolate cupcakes (courtesy of The Nerd’s Wife) that make you groan when you eat them. They’re that good. But really, we’re amateurs, and we wanted more variety than we could make ourselves. I asked around on Twitter, and I kept hearing about this new place Gobble Cakes that was coming to town. I thought the name was adorable – Gobble Cakes! – it’s so fun to say and it just makes you want to gobble those cute little cakes up. It took me about six weeks to figure out the clever secondary (or maybe primary?) meaning of the name. Here in Blacksburg, the Virginia Tech mascot is the Hokiebird. A turkey. Get it?! Gobble gobble?!! My son rolled his eyes when I made this discovery and then excitedly told them the genius second meaning of the name. He had figured it out weeks ago.
Anyway, the kids and I must have checked every week to try to figure out when Gobble Cakes was going to open, and we were finally rewarded this weekend when we made a family trek downtown for cupcakes. As we drove into town and saw the streets hopping, we wondered if we would ever find a parking spot at 7:30 pm on the Friday before Halloween. Luckily it wasn’t as hard as we anticipated, and we enjoyed the excited energy of college-town Halloween revelry on our walk to the bakery. We heard the deck party sounds of laughter and beer bottles clanking, and watched twenty-somethings in fairy costumes, and motorcycle chaps, and our kids’ favorite, Waldo (three young men together, all dressed in red and white striped shirts, all wearing Waldo’s signature hat with the red pom pom on top. I hope they were going to a big party with scads of people so that they’d get lost in the crowd for live games of Where’s Waldo?)
Gobble Cakes was hopping, too, and when we walked in I couldn’t wipe the stupid grin off my face. There was a steady stream of customers, for one thing, which always adds exciting vibrancy to an eatery. But I loved the boutique feel of it, too. The place is polished – not just the confectionery display of cakes on silver plates behind glass, but the simple color palette of fun, tastefully pink walls, white trim, elegant black and white photos of Blacksburg and the VT stadium – and my favorite details – awnings over the blackboard menu and the interior multi-paned window that looked in on the kitchen. The kids and I loved that window. We oohed and aahed over the baking racks, the industrial-sized floor mixers, the giant sacks of flour that were bigger than the kids. Our daughter particularly loved the googly eyes the pastry chef was wearing for Halloween.
When I finally decided on a cupcake, I chose their Breast Cancer Awareness special for October – a lemon cake with a lemon pastry cream filling and a honey frosting. And I tell you what, that was the best cupcake I’ve ever eaten. I usually go for the frosting – I’m a big frosting fan, especially if it’s cream cheese – but this lemon cake was so good I didn’t even need the frosting. The flavor was light and bright and subtly lemony, but what really blew me away was the texture. It was moist and spongy, with a tender crispness on the outside, not unlike the crisp texture of a perfectly cooked chocolate chip cookie, but way more delicate. And the quiet crust didn’t just contribute texture, it lent flavor, too, because it had that slightly toasted sweetness that you only want a little bit of, to contrast against the lightness of the cupcake’s interior. Wow. That was good stuff. I wish I could figure out how to bake cake like that.
The rest of the family loved their cupcakes, too, and when I asked if the cupcakes were good enough to go back to Gobble Cakes, the kids’ eyes got wide and they both nodded emphatically and shouted, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” Our daughter devoured an Apple Pie cake (it was light and moist – it had definitely risen) with cream cheese frosting, our son gobbled up a Drillfield Delight (chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting), and my husband savored his Hokie Love, red velvet with cream cheese frosting (sorry Florian – he said it was delicious). I agree that its worth a return visit. I can’t wait to go back and try the other cupcake I really wanted – the cinnamon cake with maple cream cheese frosting, topped with a crispy slice of candied bacon. My husband never jumped on the bacon and cake bandwagon, but I’m saving my pennies.
You can follow Gobble Cakes on Facebook and Twitter for coupon tips and flavor updates.
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It was 80 degrees yesterday, and you know how retail stores are. If it’s warmer than 75 degrees out, you can bet you’ll be shivering inside. I was fine until I ate lunch, when all my warm, cozy blood went to my stomach to participate in the digestive party and left the rest of my body out in the cold. Even my cardigan couldn’t keep the chill off, and I walked customers to the shelves, shivering. I made the mistake of mentioning the cold to an old grump, and she took that as an opportunity to go into a tirade, not unlike my own here, about how cold it was and I don’t understand why they feel the need to turn the A/C down so low, dipping her head and giving me eyebrow gestures to let me know she thought I should notify a manager of the situation.
I smiled and nodded, and gracefully escaped her to go cover someone’s break up at the cash register. As there were no customers in line, I took advantage of a pool of warm light by the front window. I stood there, absorbing the sunlight and thinking, cats have it made, laying around all day in sunbeams. I thought of Garfield, and that slanted beam of light Jim Davis always drew him in. The sunbeam always stuck with me about Garfield. That and the lasagna. It never clicked as a kid that cats don’t eat lasagna, but as an adult it finally occurred to me to wonder, what’s up with that? A cat who loves lasagna? I don’t get it.
A customer ahem-ed me out of my reverie, and I apologized profusely for standing in the sunbeam while she waited patiently for me to finish my daydreams. While I rang up her purchase we laughed and carried on about how good the sunbeam felt, and how I had moved here from Minnesota, and isn’t the weather glorious today? As we said goodbye, fast friends now, she pointed to my little puddle of light and said, “You stay in your sunbeam!” I liked that. Stay in your sunbeam. So I did.
I wrote this between customers today, on tiny scraps of paper, when I was covering another 15 minute break. The sunbeam wasn’t there anymore, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t stay in it. I was inspired by my friend Liv’s recent piece, how to claim your fortune, about messages we receive throughout the day. You should read it. I think you’ll like it.
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Well, here it is, 6 am and I’m at my writing practice. I’m on my second cup of coffee and am nursing paper cuts from book jackets. I wonder who I’ll shelve today? I hope I get the fiction section. I feel like I’m among friends there.
I started a new book last night, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which I had originally passed over because I thought it was a knock-off of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, or the flying sweet potato pants or whatever that Ya-Ya like series was. But two adorable older women were in the book store the other day, obviously tight, spunky literary friends, and they asked for recommendations. I suggested Elegance of the Hedgehog, and they erupted into, “See, I told you!” and “Okay, okay, I guess I need to read it.” The one who had already read Elegance was now my best friend for life and told me that because of my fine taste in new reading, she couldn’t wait to see what I could give her. I started her off with Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, The Weird Sisters, and A Reliable Wife, and she and her friend hunched over the synopses on the back cover, tracing words with their fingers like a mother does when she read to her child.
The two had come into the store to buy The Guernsey Literary Society book, and when I asked about it, they just gushed. It is absolutely not a Ya-Ya knockoff, and is in fact about a post-WWII literary society on a small island that had been occupied by Germany. The society was born of a secret pig roast (the islanders were not allowed to keep pigs – the Germans commandeered all the swine) and the lie of a book discussion a member told to German soldiers when they were caught out after curfew. There is a truth in the lie, though, in that apparently the members of this small island group do love literature and have lively discussions about it as they continue to meet. That’s as far as I’ve gotten so far, but I’ve already come across a line that delights me, and that I (and all my fellow booksellers) can absolutely I identify with:
“Booksellers really are a special breed. No one in their right mind would take up clerking in a bookstore for the salary… So, it has to be a love of readers and reading that makes them do it – along with first dibs on the new books.”
Yep, that pretty much sums it up. All my life I have flitted from one interest to another, taking up hobbies or studies then casting them aside – ecology (my degree), quilting, knitting, soapmaking. Nothing ever seems to stick. Except literature. My earliest memories are of reading books, laying on my bed with my feet on the wall. I remember palm trees scraping my windows at night when I read Salem’s Lot, and how that screeching on the glass terrified me. I remember reading and re-reading The Secret Garden, and how Shel Silverstein was my go-to when I didn’t have a novel to read. My earliest desire was to one day have a house with a bay window with a bench so that I could sit in the window and read. That hasn’t happened, but I’ve still got a lot of life, and a lot of reading left in me. Maybe it will yet.
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hazel eyes
like oak leaves and acorns:
our daughtercrisp breath
and crunching,
I rake pilesprongs scrape,
scour,
scratch the earth’s backin October,
birch leaves flutter –
gold coins from the skymaples sway,
dangling rubies
in the sunwith pink cheeks,
a red nose,
I comb earth’s grassy manean oak leaf
twirls through
sapphire skylate afternoon –
cool wine, a
strong slant of lighta rush,
and then,
a rain of dry leavesend over end,
an oak leaf
tumbles
