His Dogness

This column first appeared in the October 2013 issue of Forsyth Family magazine:

For a long time, I pictured Sparkle Girl growing up to be an artist just like her mother. She clearly has a gift, and, ever since I have known her, she has been drawing pictures that make people smile.

Lately, though, I have taken to imagining her growing up to own her own bakery. A while back, Sparkle Girl decided that she wanted to take up baking. She went right to it in a serious way. She would look through magazines and cookbooks and pick out the recipe that looked as if it would be the most fun to make next. One day, she might choose lemon cupcakes with lemon icing. Another day, it might be French macaroons.

I was impressed by the fact that she was ambitious, and, if something didn’t turn out, it didn’t derail her enthusiasm. She might try the recipe again the next time she baked, or, if some other recipe that she had discovered beckoned, she would move on to that. This year, when she asked what kind of cake I wanted her to bake for my birthday, the wonderful German apple cake with streusel topping that she had made was still fresh in my taste buds’ memories, so I asked for that.

Sparkle Girl has also started fixing meals for the family from time to time. All the baking and cooking got me thinking about the day, years ago, that Sparkle Girl announced, as we headed to a diner for supper one night, that she thought it would great to own her own diner some day with pictures of her hanging on the walls. In keeping with my tendency to take notions to the extreme, I was soon talking about menus illustrated with her picture and pictures of her on vinyl chair backs and pictures of her, in black and white, on the sheets that you hand out with crayons for children to color while they wait for their chicken nuggets to be served.

When Sparkle Girl learned that I planned to bring up that story in print, she asked me promise to make sure that everyone knew that she was really young when she imagined that and that now that she is 14, she most would certainly not dream of suggesting such a thing. It would be best, she said, if I made that point twice.

I bring up the story not to embarrass Sparkle Girl’s present-day self but because I wonder whether, one day, the Sparkle Girl Diner or the Sparkle Girl Bakery will open and we will look back and say, “Huh. Who knew when we were having fun that day when you were 7 that this day would come?”

If I ever had a pile of extra money – no sign of that happening at the moment – I would open a place down the street from the Sparkle Girl Bakery called Bob’s House of Pimiento Cheese even though my name isn’t Bob because I think there should be a place that specializes in pimiento cheese should exist and that Bob’s is the best name for it.

In recent days, Doobins has been thoroughly enjoying watching a cable television show about the people in a bakery in Hoboken, New Jersey who make elaborate custom cakes that cost at least $1,000 and may cost up to $8,000. Doobins gets quite involved in the process and offers crisp observations. He hasn’t started baking himself yet but – who knows? – maybe one day, they will go into the bakery business together. After stopping off at Bob’s House of Pimiento Cheese for a sandwich, you can walk down the street to their bakery and pick up a flaky croissant or a cake that looks like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Remember, though, don’t expect to find any pictures of Sparkle Girl on the wall.