In the town where I grew up, there was a place called “Tasty Bakery.” It had a huge electric sign in the shape of a cartoon baker—imagine the Pillsbury Doughboy, maybe a few pounds lighter, with rosy cheeks. It’s nice to remember my town as it was: quiet, and full of family businesses. I guess when the Starbucks moved in, and the Eddie Bauer followed, the decline was really only a matter of time.
With my twenty-fifth birthday looming—and no, it doesn’t just approach, it decidedly looms—I had a sudden onset of nostalgia for Tasty Bakery, home of the best black and white cookies in the world, other cookies shaped as Chicago Bears helmets, and above all the raspberry chocolate birthday cake. Some of my first memories of home are from my older sisters’ birthdays: my mother would get the cake from the bakery and set it on a beautiful glass cake-stand. I think my love of single-use utensils originates with that stand; melon-ballers, garlic presses, and apple-corers have a special place in my heart because they are items that know their purpose. The cake itself was a two layer contraption of dense chocolate and raspberry filling. On top, around the circumference of the upper layer, were small nests of chocolate frosting and preserves. These, too, served a single purpose: they were where to place the candles.
I went looking for that bakery on the internet, hoping against hope that it hadn’t closed but simply moved. I was out of luck: the number, with my hometown area code, had been disconnected.
When we first moved there, my town was small: two lane roads and empty plots in our development. Storms would come over the prairie preserve across the street, turning the sky a bizarre and thrilling green, and then a thick, dark black. My friends and I would dig holes in the vacant lots and cover them with plywood as forts—afternoon kingdoms fed on goldfish crackers. There was one farmstand where we always bought our corn: a dozen-dozen ears. My dad and the daughters would gather on the back porch and shuck one hundred and forty-four ears of corn, which my father would then scrape, so my mother could freeze the corn-guts for sweet corn soufflé all winter long. My dad and his brother built me the biggest swing-set in the neighborhood with precut lumber; Chuck told my dad it was nuts to have it precut, and when it came together perfectly, my dad was nothing short of smug. I watched my sisters get ready for prom in the brightly lit mirrors in my parents’ bathroom—last minute hysterics over deodorant stains on black taffeta, followed by a deeply enviable entrance down our wrap-around flight of stairs into the foyer.
Sometimes I wonder how Laura Ingalls Wilder felt, writing out her childhood. I acknowledge that there is a very large difference between looking back at your childhood through the lens of industrialization as opposed to yuppification, but I still feel as though I’ve lost something. I view my childhood as something that is over, and therefore in some ways separate from my continuing relationships. I isolate people and places in memory, and in a way, put them in storage: the role they played in my childhood, and who they were then, remains static in the place where I keep my memories. In that space, my oldest sister, who now keeps her hair buzz-cut short, will always have blonde hair down to the middle of her back and wear her letterman’s jacket. My middle sister will always wear dark lipstick and oversized sweaters. My parents are perpetually forty, a time anomaly with which my mother takes no issue.
If one can extrapolate such a verb, I have in essence snow-globed my past—I’ve wrapped glass around the time between my first memories and roughly my twelfth birthday, and every now and then I look into the strange little world and see things that I miss, things that I wonder about. My relationship to my own history is a strange and complex beast, often taking on different incarnations. We necessarily live in our own timelines and tell ourselves stories to make sense of our own history—a post-modern, personalized myth-making, if you will. My favorite history professor in college said once that every generation invents its own past, and I think she’s right, though it’s not a one way street, as her syntax might indicate. As we invent our own pasts, we simultaneously draw on them to inform who we are. This is just one of many odd, tautological cycles I can’t quite seem to shake as I think about getting older. And all of this started because I wondered about a bakery I used to know.
I tell myself a story about my childhood: a snow-globe, a Laura-Ingalls-Wilderization of my history. Taken as simply a story, not as a living part of my own timeline—though it is both—maybe that story is one of those single-purpose objects I love; an emotional cake-stand: mostly useless, but lovely to have when you need it.
When my birthday loomed, then arrived, then passed with remarkable timeliness, I felt incredibly self-conscious, as if the universe were looking at me and saying, “Well? You’re twenty-five now. What do you have to say for yourself?”
I would say that I have some pretty good stories to tell, and that I’m sure it will be a riot to look back at the snow-globe I will inevitably create sometime in the future, and marvel at my sweet and ridiculous twenties.
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