Tuesday, 09 April 2002 | Amish bread

A girl at work has given me a large Ziploc bag full of soupy, off-white liquid along with a page of instructions. It says I am to squeeze and massage and regularly deflate the bag over a period of ten days before adding a long list of ingredients and exposing the mixture to intense heat. It says that after I have done this, I will have two pans of Amish cinnamon bread.

I don't doubt something will be wrong with my bread; I will go through all that trouble only to have my unusually hot oven turn the bottom inch to black ash, or I will forget to take it out until I smell it, or my error will occur during the ten-day preparation, a result of neglect or confusion.

I don't like to cook, I'm rather impatient, and I like to work on projects from start to finish in one giant lump, rather than working on them in daily segments. So, considering that this girl knows me fairly well, why did she choose me as a recipient of the batter? I have no idea. I'm somehow flattered, though. I've decided I'm going to see this through, all ten days, until my kitchen smells like oxidized matter.

***

Tonight, after getting home from work, (and after giving the batter a healthy squeeze), I got out one of my old German textbooks and began reading aloud, answering the exercises as I went. They're among a few of the textbooks I can visually picture without opening them—the drawings and the pictures, where the words on the page belong, the charts that make sense of articles and cases. While I read over the lessons, I can remember sitting in class in Berlin, my teacher's enunciated voice, and the sentences the boys from Peru would invent. Once I secretly recorded my class, by hiding my Walkman and microphone in a bag beneath my desk.

I've been meaning to read through these books for a while, to slow the steady evacuation of German from my brain, but it's one of those things I never get around to doing. Today, though, I automatically took one off the shelf and collapsed with it on the bed. The words looked familiar and friendly and it was fun to drag up the strange noises, the hisses and umlauts. As I read, my cat sat beside me, distracting me, purring while she stared at me with big, round eyes.