December 15, 2008
Monday

The dough she was handling gave off a heavy, moist fragrance. He caught a whiff of it as she placed it in the bread machine and set the dials.
“What is that?”
“Honey spice bread,” she said. “It’s got shredded apple and orange peel and a spice I never heard of.”
“Cardamom,” he said.
“Right,” she said. “How did you know?”
“I had it before, a long time ago. I like it.”
                          — Margaret DeAngelis, b. 1947
                              American fiction writer
                              from “Cardamom,” an unpublished short story

The excerpt above is from a manuscript I call my “best unpublished work” (the phrase that conferences and fellowships use to describe the writing sample they want you to send). Sometimes I call it “my most successful story,” in part because it is in its final form (about the dozenth draft) and, while it has been turned down by several publications, it has earned what some of us on a writers’ message board call an “encouraging rejection” (that is, “we can’t use this, but we are impressed and please send us something else”). I haven’t sent something else because I don’t have anything else this complete and this polished.

I began the piece on a Sunday afternoon in October of 2001. I was sitting at a picnic table in the park across from the apartment where I lived in the fall of 1970. The kitchen in that place was a corner of the living room. It had a refrigerator with a tiny freezer compartment that held only one ice cube tray, a set of metal cabinets that were hung crooked, and a “cooking unit” such as one might buy for a camp cottage — a two-burner electric stove, an oven too narrow for the standard-size cookie sheets I bought at G.C. Murphy, and a sink so shallow I could wash only one dish or pan at a time. Nevertheless, I baked a lot in that place, mostly a yeast bread from my sister’s high school home ec cookbook that made a single loaf that you could knead in the bowl. (I had no counter space and you had to be careful how you leaned on the dining table, which was really on half a table with just three legs, although the landlord had provided six chairs.)

A character began speaking that afternoon in 2001, as I sat and looked at the living room window that had been mine. My wife is baking bread tonight. A fragrance I can’t name fills the air. This is a new hobby of hers. The first woman I ever loved baked bread . . . As his voice developed he acquired a name, Daniel, and some of the characteristics of a young man I’d known the year I lived in that apartment. A student teacher at my school, he often sat through lunch with us with only a cup of the coffee that was always available. He claimed he wanted to lose weight, but I was pretty sure he had no money for lunch. I started packing extra sandwiches made from thick slices of the bread I baked and offering him one, claiming I wasn’t hungry enough for another serving. I’d done that for a friend when we’d been student teachers together. We’d lost touch, and I missed him, and offering the sandwiches to someone else gave me a measure of comfort.

Although there is no cardamom in the hearty sandwich loaf I baked, that year that I lived on Walnut Street is probably the first time I heard of this exotic and expensive spice. My mother gave me a Better Homes and Gardens general cookbook for Christmas. It had a recipe for lussekatter, the traditional rolls for St. Lucy’s Day in Sweden, and Williamsburg rolls, both of which use cardamom. If you’ve read my piece from Saturday, you can imagine how the lussekatter captured my imagination. I probably didn’t bake those complicated recipes until the next year, in a more spacious apartment with real counter space, a standard oven, and a broad work table I bought myself.

The scent of cardamom permeates my story. The character gets his first whiff of it in more than twenty years, and it recalls the days he spent as the teaching colleague of a slightly older woman who was kind to him, giving him a ride to school and letting him use her apartment as a haven from the noisy dormitory where he couldn’t get any studying done. He came to love her with the hopeless and impossible love a young man must have for a woman who is beyond his reach. The bread, so like the bread she baked, triggers in him a longing to see her one more time, even though to do so will risk the very real happiness in the life he has built.

The scent of cardamom permeates my Christmas The basic sweet roll dough I bake up in half a dozen variations uses it. (In addition to the lussekatter I make a shaped bread that looks like a poinsettia and another that looks like a dove, its wings covered in slivered almonds and dusted with cinnamon.) From Thanksgiving to Epiphany there will be some kind of cardamom bread in the house. I use cardamom throughout the year in the dinner rolls I make sometimes for guests. I even made them in Wyoming last year for my artists’ community Thanksgiving dinner, with a tiny packet of cardamom I got at the health food store and the recipe scanned and faxed by Ron.

There is an eating scene, or at least a significant reference to food, in every piece of fiction I write, and most often that food is bread. Food is love for me, and baking bread and serving it to others is an expression of the esteem in which I hold them. When I baked the dinner rolls in Wyoming last year, I noted that “I’ve written a short story in which a character experiences a painful longing for people he is no longer connected to after he breathes the aroma of cardamom bread baking. His story ends in disappointment because he can never have that time in his life back.”

The Holidailies writing suggestion for today asks for a description of “the top three scents or flavors that always evoke holidays for you.” Cardamom is so powerful for me that I don’t need any others. It brings to my mind a multitude of people I have served my homemade bread to, some of whom I’ll see before this Christmas season is over, some of whom I’ll never see again. I can’t have any part of the past back, not really. All any of us ever have is now. But when I open that jar, when I shake the smoky powder into my recipe, when I breathe this beloved aroma, I have with me, at least for a moment, everyone I have ever loved.

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A year ago, I repeated a piece from 2004 about spending a night as a volunteer in a shelter for the homeless. It embarrasses me that I have done nothing since then except write checks.

Two years ago, I tried to perform a random act of holiday kindness, and was rebuffed.

Three years ago, I recalled the events of May 2005.

Four years ago, I wrote about making the dips for my upcoming party.

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