Read Online Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt - Free Book Online Page A

better.” Her friend Liz Hale, a dermatologist, told me, “In part of a single evening, Amy taught me more about nursing a screaming baby than all the lactation professionals I consulted.” Her pediatric colleague, Gail Warner, said, “Most doctors are smart, but Amy had judgment, too. I used to go to her with my problems.” She also appreciated the wonder within the science of her work. When Andrew had just been born, and we all were in the hospital room with Wendy, Amy picked up the new baby, flipped him over, turned him this way and that, and studied him like a photographer holding a negative to the light.
     
    Amy is responsible for getting my toaster in Quogue. It replaced a toaster that no one but me could stand because you had to find the precise setting or it would burn the toast, or undercook it, or toast only one side of the bread. Amy hated that toaster more than anyone because of the toll it took on bagels. I defended it, mainly for its Art Deco look. It was streamlined, chrome, and round at the edges. But Amy favored reality over appearance, and when planning a gift for my birthday, she persuaded Harris, Carl, Wendy, and John that they should pool their resources and get me a new expensive Viking “professional” toaster that worked. It has a “warm” feature on the dial, and a boxier shape than the old toaster, which I keep around as a backup. The old one also serves as an auxiliary toaster, when I have to accommodate all the children at once. But the new one is my best toaster.
     
    After the July Fourth weekend, Ginny, Harris, and the children return to Maryland. Jessie and Sammy are eager to get back to their Wii, a virtual reality video game that Harris got them at the start of the summer. I need to stay on in Quogue for the Southampton Writers Conference, which extends from mid-July to the end of the month. The writers, who also teach workshops, pair up for the evening readings. This summer I am partnered with Frank McCourt. Frank reads from his first work of fiction. I had thought to read from my novel Beet , which had come out in February. But while looking for something in a tangle of papers, I came across an essay I’d written for Time twenty-one years earlier, called “Speech for a High School Graduate.” It was an attempt at a literary commencement speech, written to honor Amy. I wrote similar Time essays for Carl and John upon their high school graduations, using the trope of a father giving his personal commencement speech to his children as he looked to their future.
    I decide to read the essay instead of the passage from my novel. I would not have done so for an audience of strangers, but Bob Reeves, the conference director, has fostered a familial atmosphere over the years, and the participants have grown close. When Amy died, Billy Collins wrote us, “Sometimes there are no words.” Frank, Matt Klam, Lou Ann Walker, Meg Wolitzer, and others stayed in constant touch. Melissa Bank sent a little package containing a floral handkerchief for Ginny, audiotapes of short stories for my drives, and a chestnut she had found in the driveway of a restaurant in Tuscany some years ago, which had given her comfort. I do not think the essay to Amy will feel inappropriate. So after Frank finishes, I read what I had written when Amy was seventeen. It interests me how many of my wishes for her had come true—her love of travel, of animals, of music, her appreciation of history, her enthusiasm for sports, her respect for traditions. I wished her fierceness in battle, but urged her not to hang onto corrosive enmities. I wished her a love of work, predicting that it would have “something to do with helping others.” I wished her productive solitudes, and worthy friends, though in her case that wish was superfluous. I wished her the pleasure of an exchange of wit with a stranger, and moments of helpless hilarity. I wished her life in a place where she might see a stretch of sky. The essay ends with a