Buckeyes

Buckeyes

I am in Florida for Christmas. My sister is here, too. Bored with Barcelona, she spent last month in a small town in France, then is moving to Thailand next week. She came back for December to spend the holidays with us for the first time in 3 years, and to do PR for her book that came out the beginning of the month.

I got here Sunday night. Mom drove me in from the airport. When we turned into the driveway, I noticed the Christmas lights weren’t blinking from the tall hedge next to the house. First December those haven’t been there.

”Where are the lights?” I asked, a little frozen, waiting for her response.

”Oh, the hedge is too tall now. I decided not to bother.”

I registered this. Mom’s eighty-one now. Things are winding down.

I came in and my father and sister met us in the kitchen, with the little Pomeranian, Fang, who I brought down here from New Jersey when my mom’s other Pom, Tyler, died. We sat around the kitchen table talking, and because I always like to have a plan (whether or not I adhere to it), I said, “Okay, so what are we doing this week?”

One of the things I wanted to do was mail a box of Buckeyes to a friend. Mom said, “I didn’t make buckeyes this year. It seemed like too much trouble.”

I can’t say I was surprised to hear this. But I still had a physical reaction to it—sort of like a small electric shock to my neurological system. Every other Christmas since I left for college, when I got home for the holidays, there were trays and trays of buckeyes taking up space in the freezers.

Buckeyes have been a tradition in our family for as long as I can remember. They’re peanut butter balls dipped in a chocolate casing. The recipe makes about 10 trillion dozen, so it takes forever to make them. (And longer before they go away.) First you roll the balls and then dip them individually into the chocolate coating. When you're finished, there are so many of them that it’s like home-grown tomatoes in August: though they're delicious, they exist mostly to be given away. There’s more than one family can possibly eat.

Let the reader know two things:
1.) That my parents were childless for many years, and then having abandoned hope of producing offspring, were suddenly surprised, late in life, by producing two in quick succession, after all. (I remind you of this because those of you good with numbers may be trying to estimate Cupcake’s age—and that’s a difficult thing to do anyway, as Cupcake has TADD, Time Attention Deficit Disorder, and as a consequence her aging process has been random, so that one year she is might be much younger than she was in the previous year, only to leap several years ahead and back again in following years. This has created a certain ambiguity in her appearance which has delighted casting directors for years, as she can sort of assume any age, as required. (Cupcake would also like to thank Clarin’s sunscreen products for their assistance in her chrono-chamileon abilities, and to encourage her readers of any age to WEAR THE EFFING SUNSCREEN, YO!)

AND 2.) Cupcake, for the first time, made the Buckeyes herself.

It was a little sad. But a little joyful. At least Mom was there to supervise, and it felt somehow like a rite of passage. Perhaps all rites of passage have an element of sadness to them.

In Swaziland,the boys wrestle a Yak to the ground when they come of manhood. I wonder if as they are doing it, they also have a sense of wonderment, at going through the motions as if watching themselves. If they think, “Am I really doing this? Is it now my turn?”

At any rate, the chocolate coating mixture in the top of the double boiler was the color of the Swazi mud in the corral where the wrestling is done. (I know because after the wrestling is done there is a ceremony, which I went to, where all the women had to stand barefoot in the ankle deep mud, the color of which I will never forget.)

So the Buckeyes are made. I didn’t make the full batch, so I only have 5 trillion dozen to disperse through the universe as tokens of Cupcake’s family holiday goodwill. If you would like some, email me and I will send you some. I like the thought of a readers sitting at their computers, reading blogs while eating chocolate peanut-butter balls I rolled, one after another, as emblems of holiday tradition. They’re very good. (Although I actually haven’t eaten one for two decades, since I noticed a long time ago that whenever I eat sugary things, I get a headache and often start to cry for no reason.)

There is surely more to come on being home for the holidays. And there’s more I could write about right now, like the fact that my roommate in Jersey City was awakened this morning by an intruder opening the door to her room and turning on the lights. She reports that when she sat up in bed and said "What the $*#@?!”, he screamed like a girl and ran away. (After saying so silly things that I don’t feel like explaining right now.)

There are reasons to wonder if perhaps this “break-in” is connected to my lovely new “landlords”, the people who bought the house from me. And I cannot WAIT to get out of there.

But that’s for another time. Right now I just wanted to let concerned readers know that the Buckeyes have been made. I may even go out and decorate the hedge with twinkling lights.

It’s great to be with the family, though. I wonder how long that will last. I hope the whole time I am down here. I hope I can get through all the days without losing sight of how precious this time with them is. Then it really would be the best Christmas ever.