The Toasted Tomato

Because of the fading line between past and present on account of Facebook and Google, where anyone lost can be found, this column is going to take some delicate maneuvering. But after this weekend I realize there is one story that needs to be told — even if it requires a few aliases.

We were all standing around in the kitchen at my in-laws’ house Saturday, and somehow we got onto the subject of high school crushes. After my sisters-in-law shared their stories, my mother-in-law admitted that she, too, had had a lengthy crush on a boy. That is until the exact second he walked up to her and asked her out.

“After that, I never wanted anything to do with him,” she said.

That led us into a discussion about the extreme yo-yo that is the crush: the terrible, fantastic longing but, in certain cases, the instant cure, the eye-opening moment when you realize that this person you’ve dreamed about is devastatingly ordinary.

It was then that I shared my whopper.

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When I first started my cooking life, my fridge was almost invariably full of leftovers. Each day, I would flip through my cookbooks (which all had pictures accompanying every recipe) and decide what I felt like eating. One night might be coq au vin. The next might be burgers. On Wednesday, we might have spaghetti carbonara.

So I’d head to the grocery and buy all the ingredients, come back and get to work. And the next day, I would do the same.

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Last Sunday, Gabrielle Baker got to work drawing up movie tickets while my husband filled red and white-striped buckets with popcorn. I headed to the basement to put the finishing touches on the “theatre,” namely displaying boxes of Sweet Tarts, Junior Mints and Swedish Fish in a bowl.

At 2 p.m., just in time for show time, in walked my in-laws — Linda and Mr. Baker; Teresa, her husband Scott, and sons Eric and Reece; and Leah and her daughter Kennedy, with husband Art missing the party for a Sunday work shift.

“Here is your ticket,” Gabrielle said excitedly. “Admit one to the movie ‘Forgotten Images.’”

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Gabrielle Baker is sitting in the front seat of my car with the vanity mirror down. Her posture is perfect, her smile is sparkling, but her hair, oh, but her hair looks fantastic. Every once in a while, she swings her head a little bit to make her hair dance, smiles again and looks about 16.

This morning, I sat in the beauty salon, peering over my delicious People magazine, watching her get her hair cut. She sat in the far corner with a black smock wrapped around her, and her wet hair was combed like an awning over her face. My beloved hairdresser Kathy, with bubblegum pink hair and skin sleeved in tattoos, was asking her questions and 12-year-old G was prattling on, as she often does since she’s never once been shy.

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I’ve just woken up from a nap, something I almost never treat myself to and almost always regret afterward. But this morning, after a restless night and an hour staring at a blank computer screen, I decided it was time to give up and go back to sleep.

The thing about a nap when you’re an adult is it always starts out well. You curl up on the couch, cover yourself with a cozy blanket and grab a book, perhaps the third installment of “The Hunger Games” series if you’re feeling very dedicated to reading pulp this summer. You start reading and your eyelids being to droop. You close them for a second, test it out, realize it feels very enjoyable, but Katniss is about to shoot an explosive arrow at an airplane bomber. So you heavily open your eyes back up, read a few more paragraphs and then let your lids fall again. Perhaps another flutter and then you’re drifting, drifting, gone.

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I’ve spent the last half hour reading old column, something I like to do when I don’t have a topic in mind for the week. Generally, I look back on what was happening last year at this time, in part because it gives me ideas but also because it’s nice to nestle into the memories for a while.

While I’ve been reading, I realize that it’s once again the anniversary of my column. For seven years now, you’ve been patient enough to read about my life.

Thinking on it, seven years is a good, long chunk of time. Not a decade, mind you, but enough to make one itch, enough to make a person evaluate. Because there is a big difference between age 28 and age 35, especially in the tick-tock life of a woman.

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Right now, I’m huddled in the basement bedroom as a flurry of activity takes place upstairs. The vacuum is whirring across the living room floor. The clean lemon scent of Lysol is wafting down the stairs. And cupboards are getting wiped that have needed to get wiped for a long time.

The best thing is all I have to do is sit here and let it happen. I can’t say it’s the beach, but it’s pretty close to paradise.

A few weeks ago, my friend Candice casually asked me what I wanted for my 35^th while we were working out at the gym. As I checked my phone, and discovered I’d been assigned several stories, I sighed and complained the living room just wasn’t going to get dusted as planned. I was immediately irritated, not because I had any desire to dust the living room, but because I knew I needed to and now didn’t have the time, which is exactly how it had gotten so dusty in the first place.

Upon arriving home and diving into the stories, I received a cheerful text from Candice informing me a day of cleaning was my birthday gift.

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When I woke up this morning, the single chime of the Zen alarm my husband bought on a whim didn’t sound quite as annoying. As I stretched my poor, newly 35-year-old body, it didn’t seem quite as stiff. And as I went to make Gabrielle and William breakfast, things pulled together smoothly, rather than the boiled-over cream of wheat and burned toast from a few days before.

As I washed the dishes and reviewed what I had to get accomplished during the day, it was then I realized why the morning was so sweet. See, it’s Friday, dear readers, that glorious, best day of the week when birds sing a little louder and don’t poop on your car quite as much.

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I debated whether or not to include a photo with this week’s post as sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. But then I thought some of you might be reading this over breakfast or lunch or even over coffee and that photo would destroy whatever appetite you might have.

So I’ll have to just rely on words and hope that they’ll do. As I told you a few weeks ago, we’re having a problem with a certain bluebird that has made a home in our birch trees. Said bluebird is addicted to pooping on our cars whenever possible. And for the past six weeks now, whenever we step outside in the morning, we are greeted with waterfalls of the stuff descending from the driver’s and front passenger windows of our vehicles.

After lengthy Internet research, we’ve concluded the bird believes that when he looks in our side-view mirrors he is seeing another male and, thus, competitor for female attention. Obviously not elegant in handling stress, he cramps and poops down the windowsill and pecks at the mirror to get rid of the bird. This, as you can imagine, doesn’t work.

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I’m not sure if it has to do with anything else, whether it’s karma or pay back for having a good life in other ways, but I can say in all sincerity that my husband has the worst luck I’ve ever seen.

If we’re on a road trip of any distance, for instance, it will start to rain. Rain hard. And the rain will follow him wherever he seems to go. Lexington? Ohio? Indiana? Montreal? Doesn’t matter.

And he never makes it through the longest red light in town without having the longest wait possible, always turning the corner and arriving a split second after the light has turned. So he invariably sits there waiting, first in line, watching the cross traffic go through a green cycle and then a turn cycle.

When he was a medical resident, his nickname was Black Cloud Baker and no one ever wanted to be on call with him because they knew it would be the worst, most tortuous night. Machines would break or patients would go crazy, the cafeteria would serve gray meatloaf and attendings would be in unusually bad moods.

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