What would your family do if you keeled over dead? How would they fill in the hole? What would they have to learn to do, and in a hurry?

If I went poof, I expect my family would say things like:

“Why do we keep running out of toilet paper?”

“So, so tired of mac ‘n cheese/scrambled eggs/hamburgers.”

“My goodness, is that an inch of dust covering the piano? And how long since that thing has been tuned?!”

We’d all be missed, every one of us.

Roger Rosenblatt discovers this for himself when his thirty-eight-year-old daughter, Amy, collapses on her treadmill, leaving behind a husband and three small children. Rosenblatt and his wife, Ginny, drop their own lives (famous writer, house in the Hamptons) and hurry to suburban Maryland to run Amy’s household. Making Toast chronicles the first year after Amy’s death.

I thought I was in store for a sad account of some dad whose life screeches to a halt because he’s never used a toaster before, never lingered over breakfast with mere tykes. But Roger and Ginny step in, competently delivering the children to their soccer games and ballet lessons.

I struggle to remember how sad these people are when Rosenblatt (”Boppo”) portrays whimsical moments such as the daily breakfasts where he tutors the children on his Word for the Day, or when Boppo reads them stories. Or how about when the motherless children and their Rosenblatt cousins spend summer days putting on American Idol shows on a backyard stage? Or when they celebrate a birthday, shooting each other at Laser Nation?

Then there are the stories Boppo tells them about their mother. “She beat Carl and John (her brothers) in footraces without breathing hard. . . . Her flagrant cuteness. When Amy turned four, Carl was so distraught at the attention she was getting in her birthday party dress, he threw himself in the garbage can.” Amy, the girl who loved the Bionic woman. Amy, the easy athlete who once turned cartwheels all the way through Boston’s Logan Airport. Amy, the student who attended Washington’s upper-crust Sidwell Friends School. Amy, dressed up as her father’s pint-sized lunch date at one of Georgetown’s finest restaurants.

Hmm, I might have wanted to be Amy: Grow up in the New York/Harvard/Georgetown/Long Island milieu. Attend medical school. Hit that sweet spot between motherhood and career (she practiced pediatrics two days a week.)

But would I give up half a life to be this woman?

You can see that my class envy gets in the way of my empathy.

I’ll leave it to you to search out the more poignant pages of Making Toast. It’s a story of kindness, of rising to the occasion, of learning that none of us escape sorrow.


As if the class differences between the Rosenblatts and myself are not obvious enough, my own story for the week is Making Biscuits. My guess is that, once you’ve been admitted to the New York/Harvard/Georgetown/Long Island milieu, eating biscuits will get you kicked out out of the club, especially if you slather them with gravy.

Their loss.

Not my photo. But I bet mine tasted better than this.

 

It was an excellent Sunday dinner for a cook that really didn’t want to get up from her nap. The crockpot slaved over a gravy full of sausage, chopped-up eggs and cheesy soup. The biscuit dough reposed in the fridge, leftover from a dinner last week.  Once I managed to wake up, dinner came together in minutes.