Why was it that I baked the
brownies from scratch? Well, first of all, there needed to be brownies. It's
the kid's birthday, the actual birthday as opposed to the day we had the
birthday party, and we were given to understand—in the way such understandings
are given—that some parents like to send in treats for the preschool class on
the birthday, to contribute to the birthday observances. Such things are done.So you get the thing done, with the
minimum possible amount of thinking. You are already in the quicksand. Don't
flail. I would go get a box of brownie mix at the Giant, throw it together, and
be done. Duncan Hines. The job was already over, in my mind.
Or but was it Betty Crocker? I was
in the baking-stuff aisle now. Or Pillsbury? Fudge-style? Family-style? What is
a family-style brownie? Milk chocolate, for the palate of the two-year-olds?
But wasn't milk chocolate weird? Weren't brownies normally dark?The brownie-mix industry was trying
to make me responsible for these questions. I would be delivering these
brownies to a room full of two-year-olds, each with his or her own parental
strictures and guidelines. At the birthday party, in the park on Saturday, we
tried to create a brief diversion at the end between when a child picked out a
gift bag and when that child took possession, so the parents could screen the
contents and cull the M&Ms or the fruit snacks or, who knows, maybe they
mightn't approve of stickers. Different outlooks for everyone.We lifted the idea of having the
party in a park from one of his preschool classmates. The park was ideal
because going to the park constitutes, in itself, an activity, and it's an
activity that suits the atomized mindset of the more-or-less-two-year-old
partygoers. The guest of honor, for instance, spent something like half an hour
on the swings, ignoring the whole occasion. He can stay on the swings
indefinitely. I only got him down by bonking him lightly in the forehead with a
helium balloon, which is usually good for drawing him out, if a helium balloon
is handy.Nowadays, in our Age of Wonders,
you can just walk into the party store and buy a tank of helium, to keep, at a
per-balloon price that's not much different from the price of filled balloons a
la carte, provided you don't dwell on the deliberately obfuscating choice of
9-inch balloons as the reference point for the former versus 11- or 12-inchers
for the latter. I strongly recommend not dwelling. Especially since who wants
to be driving a car full of pre-inflated helium balloons?And filling balloons from your very
own tank of helium there at the party clearly counts as another party activity,
which means you've basically taken care of the party-activity problem, once you
add in the cupcakes, which you have not frosted or decorated because you are
letting the little guests frost and decorate their own. By a happy coincidence,
this means you don't have to worry about keeping the cupcakes upright in
transit.Also the parents can restrict the
frosting or sprinkles if they so choose, in their role as empowered parents.
Moreover, again: atomization. Nobody had to gather around a central cake. The
guest of honor got two candles in his own cupcake, and tried to snuff them out
with his fingers. At his first birthday, I had asked my wife, who was closer to
the high chair, to wait a second while I snapped a picture of the cake with the
lit candle, and the result was a snapshot of the precise moment he had swiftly—too
swiftly for the naked eye to register—jabbed his little finger into the
interesting bright flame. His pull-back reflex was so quick he didn't get
burned, or even cry.The choices for buying matches at
the grocery store were a jumbo box of something like 1,000, a huge collection
of paper matchbooks, or a package of eight little normal-sized matchboxes. I
got the eight-pack. When she saw it, my wife raised the possibility of putting
the boxes of matches into the children's gift bags, along with the other
divided-up multipacks of loot.But that was two or three grocery
runs ago, and now the problem was brownies, or the problem was preventing brownies
from becoming a problem. I cleared my mind and picked a box off the shelf.
Fine. Add vegetable oil and two eggs for cake-style brownies or one egg for
fudge-style brownies. What? Where was "normal brownies"? Then I
remembered: vegetable oil. The gallon jug of oil by the stove was almost empty.I had left the car at the apartment
building and walked to the store, without even bringing the old-lady rolling
shopping bag-cart, and the list of things to buy had naturally and
automatically expanded: a gallon of milk, a half-gallon of juice, some canned
goods, a head of cabbage, two pounds of green beans… I was not adding a jug of
oil.Once upon a time, before there was
a child, when we had a suburban house with not one but two wall ovens in the
spacious kitchen, I used to make brownies. Brownie-brownies, not
"cake-style" or "family-style." They were easy. They used
butter, which I already had. Flour, ditto. I grabbed a package of unsweetened
chocolate. I was not shopping for the children; I was shopping for the
brownies.We still had the old Nexis printout
of the recipe from the New York Times. Butter and chocolate. I watched
them melt together in a pan over low heat, the chocolate swirling into the
clear liquid butter, and it all came back. This thing after that thing, stirred
into a bowl: the butter-chocolate mix, sugar, an egg, another egg, flour,
vanilla. Into the pan, into the oven, out again in 20 minutes. Effortless.Later, after I had cut the brownies
and removed them from the pan, I checked the date on the
printout and saw that
the recipe had in fact appeared in the Times only a matter of weeks
before we'd sold the suburban house and moved away. Whatever past life the
butter and chocolate had evoked had not happened the way I distinctly
remembered it had.In the morning, I brought him to
school in his stroller, with the brownies on paper plates in a plastic shopping
bag. I explained to one of the teachers that I had brought them in for a
birthday snack. Are there any nuts in them? she asked.No, I said, there aren't any nuts
in them.