Just Desserts

It must have been almost thirty years ago that the family decided we could probably shake up a few traditions without pissing off the gods, and we examined the Thanksgiving dinner menu with fresh eyes. That's the kind of thing you're allowed to do when your family traditions include items from the Jell-O and marshmallow families. Dave and his sister didn't really like turkey, but the rest of us thought that was non-negotiable. Possibly even a matter of law. Punkin pie was mandatory also, but there could be a little wiggle room with other desserts. "What this dinner needs," Susan said, "is more chocolate." Or any chocolate.

I'd recently run across a promising-sounding recipe in a magazine I, as a letter carrier, was supposed to deliver, and printed off a copy of it at work at the expense of the stamp-buying public (thank you, America). I couldn't remember what it was offhand but I offered to have a look. "Does it have any chocolate in it?" Susan asked.

I located the recipe under a rumple of papers on my desk. "Let's see," I said, smoothing it out, "it's called 'Fudge-Slathered Fudge Cake.'"

"Bring it," Susan instructed.

The next day

It was one of those recipes that starts out as a pain in the ass. You preheat the oven to 350 and then you find square pans and grease them and then line them with tin foil and then grease that and flour it and knock out the excess flour, and by then your oven is preheated and you haven't even touched an ingredient. But the ingredients are tremendous. A pound of chocolate, a half pound of butter, eggs, sugar, walnuts, brandy, and two tablespoons of flour just to restore order and discipline. It's still a bit of a pain in the ass but you can feel confident it's going to be great, because chocolate butter sugar brandy. You do have to whip the egg whites and egg yellows separately and "gently fold"--god, I love that--the whites into your chocolate sludge. If there's a way to do that without losing all the loft from the egg whites, I have never found it. Then you bake your two layers, and they puff up sort of randomly, and you let them cool overnight on a rack.

The next morning your little square cake layers look all stomped to hell. They're lumpy and shrunken and flat as an old lady's tit. Or so I'm told. It's a panic situation, that first year, but hey--that's what the frosting is for. It starts out as cream and sugar. You're supposed to boil those and then reduce to low and let it bubble for ten minutes whilst "occasionally washing down sugar crystals from the side of the pan with a moistened pastry brush." Like I'm ever going to do anything with a moistened pastry brush.

The frosting is fabulous and the cakes go together beautifully, with walnuts pressed into the sides for the jazz of it. It's a hit. Anyone who ingests more than about a two-inch cube of it has to lie down on the floor for an hour, but it's a hit. And a tradition is born.

Embiggen for recipe

The next year, and all the years after that, the cakes do the exact same thing, but by then you've realized that they're only in the recipe to keep the fudge frosting layers apart, like a semi-colon holding back a pair of clauses. But the frosting doesn't set up properly. You review your ingredients, find them accurately measured, and frost the cake anyway as is. After a while someone notices it's crawling off the counter and heading for the hinterlands at a dead gallop. It's a family effort to corral the frosting with a deft posse of fingers, and even if it doesn't look like it belongs on a magazine cover, you still have to make it again the next year.

Discoveries are made over the decades. A few years in, I scribble a note in the margins: no need to grease the pans first. Duh. The tin foil slides right out. Some years the frosting works and some years it doesn't. I finally realize it's one of those heat things. It's chemistry. Chemistry was my favorite subject but when it slides into the kitchen arena, it's black magic. This frosting business is one of those candy-making deals where you have to check if your balls are hard or soft, and it's all too embarrassing. At some point I recognize that my frosting works if I let it bubble at a higher temperature for a slightly longer time. I scribble that in my margins.

I could have taken a full degree course at a culinary institute and figured this out faster than I did on my own. But I've got it working now.

Dinner is great. Dave makes a plaintive and utterly futile motion that we have prime rib instead of turkey next year. That's a tradition, too.

And Here Is My Point

I have always been sensitive to punctuation.  It sets the pace for the prose and tells it when to gallop or stop or just pull up slightly and peer over the fence. I'm very deliberate about where I put my punctuation marks. People might disagree with me over some of it but there's nothing haphazard about it. I have preferences. For instance, sometimes, I use fewer commas than my English teachers would have liked, because, sometimes, I want to charge ahead. I even use comma splices, where a semi-colon is usually called for, because I want the prose to just pop a little shrug, and not actually pause with its chin in its hand.

My father, who was a fine slinger of verbiage, was a huge fan of the semi-colon. He could not not use it. I picked that up from him, initially, but now I really try to fend it off. Instead I use a long dash--it has the same effect, but it feels different. The dash is a gentle hand on your arm. The semi-colon is dusting off its tweed sleeve and puffing at its pipe before it continues. Dad used to use so many semi-colons that his paragraphs developed a predictable, hypnotic rhythm. He'd send me a typewritten letter once a week and by the end of it my eyelids were sliding shut.

Punctuation shouldn't have the ability to make me sleepy, but I'm delicately wired that way. I don't read very fast, and I follow directions. I gallop and whoa when I'm told to. You present me with a name like "U'Neek" or "La'Shawna" and I will read a hiccup into it. I have a few friends who use ellipses. A lot. They're just in there as spacers for their thoughts. It makes all their thoughts equally important, or unimportant. "Hi...saw June the other day at the market...she says hi...doing pretty well since that monkey ate off her face...don't know if you heard about that...maybe we can get together sometime soon...okay gotta run..." When I read something like this, I actually feel myself nodding off at every ellipse. And in my mind's ear, I hear it in the same annoying intonation that is so prevalent these days: a sort of lazy, I-don't-care dip at the end of every phrase in which the vocal cords just sort of give up, and speech crumbles into rubble at the back of the throat. The speaker sounds bored as hell. Even NPR commentators do it. I want to poke at them with a sharp stick. It's possible I'm too delicately wired about some things.

So when I first saw text messaging, as practiced by the younger set, I read it the same way. There was no punctuation. No capital letters. Everything just drifted off into some neutral, apathetic space. The message felt like just one "what-ever" after another. Act like you care! I thought. Give it some voice! And sometimes, if I was feeling especially peevish, get a damn job!

Naturally, when I first started texting, I capitalized where I was supposed to and went to the trouble of inserting punctuation. I had to. It was a pain in the ass, but I didn't want it to seem like I didn't care. I still do it. But right away I could see why people didn't bother. It's a lot to ask of the thumbs. It's not necessary. It isn't a novel. It's a whole new way of communicating.

And as such, it's made its own rules. For one thing, you really shouldn't use periods at all. Instead you just start a new line. If you use a period, which requires a whole new thumb-stroke, people have to assume you went to the trouble because you were done with the conversation, and maybe not too pleased with their end of it. If you text someone "are you going to the party tonight" and she writes back "no" you have your information. If she writes back "No." you know she's definitely not going, and she's irritated about something. And it might be you. It could be that thing you did at the last party that you hoped everyone had forgotten about. Why else would she put such a final note on the conversation? If you leave off the period, everyone knows you're still available to chat.

So I get it. Text messaging has its own punctuation. It's either none, or it's a whole bunch of exclamation points or question marks to indicate sincerity or incredulity, which are not otherwise obvious in microcommunication. I'm fine with it, I really am [rogue comma splice]. I'm still going to have to capitalize and put in punctuation. I'm retired--I've got all day. And I know that my contemporaries won't be put off, and younger folk will smile indulgently and say "it's just Murr. She can't help it." Consider my text message punctuation the wistful, charming freight from a bygone era. It's the lilac scent wafting from an elderly aunt's stationery.