In Praise of Trusting There Will Be More Cake

On throwing away edible keepsakes

When my first book Group was published, my friend Carinn ordered me a cake decorated with an image of the cover on the top. We ate every bit of that chocolatey goodness, except for the cover image. I insisted that we shear off the top so I could save it forever and ever.

Two and a half years later, when my second book, BFF, entered the world, we got another cake for a pub day party. Nothing says oh my god you wrote a book like a big old sheet cake with a picture of the book cover. Again, I invited everyone to dig in after I sliced off the cover image, wrapped it in SaranWrap and laid it to rest in the freezer in our basement.

Over these past four years, it’s been delightful to reach into the freezer to fish out something for dinner and see my two book covers staring up at me. So colorful! So happy! Such a fun reminder that I’d written two books. Those cake tops said, “You might be lost today and dreading the task of coming up with a ‘dinner plan’, but once upon a time you put together 287 pages of words and shipped them to into the world.”

I save things. Clippings from my kids’ haircuts. Notes attached to our wedding gifts. Cartoons my therapist printed out and handed me during a session. Handwritten cards. Canceled checks from writing gigs. Ticket stubs. Bags of breast milk.

Once, in my very first foray into therapy, my sweet Texan therapist with a pouf of cotton candy blond hair told me that I saved things because I was afraid of death. Cool, cool, cool. I was fourteen years old. I didn’t have the courage to tell this woman that I was scared of absolutely everything, but death ranked well below acne, overeating, sex, other people’s feelings, conflict in general, and not making the first honor roll.

This week, when I faced the dark, unanswerable question: What’s for dinner?, I took a trip to the freezer for inspiration (and protein). Weirdly, all of its contents were lukewarm. A package of ground turkey dripped with an ominous pink juice. Every popsicle was now juice, and every Trader Joe’s meal was saggy mush in wet cardboard. The freezer, which had served us admirably for seven years, had given up. Days ago, apparently.

It sucked to throw out hundreds of dollars of meat, fish, and items I could not identify. We rescued a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream that had been frozen at the bottom for years, and reader, I might have dipped a serving spoon into it, but the meat juice coating the top gave me pause. I’m not trying to die of salmonella.

The waste hurt my heart. The semi-frozen pool of toxic sludge at the bottom of the hot freezer hurt my stomach. Figuring out how to replace the corpse freezer with a live model hurt my head.

But throwing away those two cake toppers hurt my soul.

“Are you ready to part with them?” my husband asked.

Sure, yeah, just give me a minute.

I laid both of them out on the counter. They’d seen better days, but they were still recognizable as my book covers. I thought of the nights we cut those cakes— how joyful it felt to have a book cake to share with my beloveds.

The cake tops aren’t actual books, though. Nor are they the people who surrounded me with love and celebration. They are flour, butter, sugar, vanilla, and eggs. They served their purpose and letting them go simply means there are no longer two slices of well-past-their-prime pieces of cake in my freezer.

I said my goodbyes and thank yous. I snapped a few pictures. I thought maybe letting go of this cake makes room for other cake.

Maybe?

As I chucked them into the trash bins that sit outside our house, it felt like an act of faith. I let go of this, and other things will take their place. Maybe a package of Costco shrimp, maybe a few pints of Jeni’s ice cream.

Maybe, one day, more book cake toppers.