Been thinking about…August cake

The storm blew through that summer afternoon and ruffled the curtains in the dining room and living room. Outside, the lilies seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief, end of a drought, and my bare feet were wet as I splashed among the lilies, photographing water droplets and a lone ladybug — a real one, not one of those weird ones that live in the soybean fields and also bite — as he made his long journey along a single pointed leaf. Inside, the house filled up with the smell of homemade spaghetti sauce and angel food cake.

August was once a time for spaghetti and angel food cake. It was my sister’s favorite birthday meal, and a family tradition. We didn’t eat in restaurants much in the ‘80s and recipes were special. For us, homemade spaghetti was a real tradition, the recipe having been passed down from my grandma’s sister, whose husband had left Italy as a boy. Simple ingredients, things like tomato paste and onion, basil and oregano, but the meal became something of a glue holding our family together long past its allotted time. Angel food cake was how I learned fractions and how to sift flour four times with cream of tartar, as well as the value of creating things from scratch instead of relying on store-bought boxes. It would be years later before I stooped to the indignity of buying a jar of spaghetti sauce.

Summer was also once the space of afternoons that soared on forever, a place of dreams and strange, childlike spaces dangerous only in that such spaces allowed us to get to know ourselves too well. “Nosce te ipsum” is the old Delphic maxim, but knowing oneself takes time and often happens when we aren’t looking. Introspection and daydreaming seem to have gotten replaced with self-help and self-care back in the Oprah era and what good is that if you don’t know who you’re helping or what you care about? Those who do not know themselves can usually be made to believe in anything with so very little effort.

Summer afternoons, good food in the kitchen and episodes of “Star Trek” nearly every night; each memory casts a kind of vision of its own into my recollections. I’ve started rewatching “Star Trek: The Next Generation” this summer though now only in the deep summer night after the rest of my work is done. The show — of which I was encouraged to watch by my sister when I was perhaps nine years old — was pivotal in my adolescent understanding of a world that, often, even then did not make a lot of sense. Sure, there was a cool ship and excitement and strange new worlds but, in the rewatching, also a sense of family, of caring, and the unique power of language and rational thought, properly exercised — “She will not remember me, sir, but I will remember her,” says Lt. Commander Data, the android officer of the Enterprise, after having become friends with a young alien girl only to oversee the erasure of her memory to prevent a breach of the prime directive. “Remembrance and regrets, they, too, are a part of friendship,” replies the customarily taciturn Picard, “And understanding that has brought you a step closer to understanding humanity.” — Season 2, Episode 15, ˆPen Pals.”

Heady stuff for a nine-year old indeed. And there is so much deep magic in the language, the words, the heart, of the recollections, even now, after the passage of so much time. Of course, there were birthday candles too, and cards, and the creaking sound the hardwood floors made in the summer when the weather changed, and the paint that had carelessly dripped on the dining room window screen, the white splash I always thought looked like the silhouette of a peacock. And there was deep magic in the black, dusty dirt of the forest, of following what might have been old trails into a deep past enshrouded with hickory leaves far bigger than my hand, and the occasional crashing sound of whitetail deer as they disappeared over a summer ridge. My hound dog was reasonably well-trained at that point, and would only sit and stare before following me back to the house, even as the weather came in with change of season.

And once again, there are more uncountable storms coming. There always are. But yet and still, I flash forward to a moment in my future, deep in the summer night, where there is again angel food cake and a heady mug of red wine, and poignant “Star Trek” music composed by Jerry Goldsmith and this gnawing idea that — with real effort and heart and intelligence and deep discipline — the future we want is possible, if only we can shake off our old conditioning, be willing to think beyond ourselves, away from the childishness and into the childlike. I pour myself a cup of black coffee, and cut another slice of homemade angel food cake. It is possible to chart a new course among the terrestrial stars, and walk the ridges of new mountains, in a future we know not yet.