Tuesday's Trifles  "Chocolate Cake is NOT Trifle!"


Well, obviously, you are likely thinking...chocolate cake bears no resemblance whatsoever to trifle.  What I really ought to say is, "Chocolate Cake is not A Trifle."  What I really mean is, chocolate cake (not even the whole cake, but just a wedge!) can be so much more than a small thing, much more than what it simply is on the plate...a fleeting pleasure of a few bites of satisfying sweetness.  Let me explain.

I have a friend who I count as one of my treasured friendships; she is someone I am so happy to have met in my life.  We have great laughs together, we share our frustrations, our disappointments, we complain about things, we talk about The World and how crazy it is and we give each other the beautiful gift of buoyancy...we buoy each other up.  Last week my friend turned 92!  When I visited her in her own home on her birthday, I apologized because I came bearing only flowers, but no homemade cake which I know she enjoys.  My day had not gone as planned, I explained, and the cake did not get baked, but I told her I would bring her some on Saturday.  I asked her what kind she preferred...chocolate or yellow?  She told me without a second's hesitation (the way the very young tell you what they want) that she would like "chocolate cake with vanilla frosting."   Saturday came and I sent my husband off to deliver the birthday cake (wedge) down the street.  Yesterday, I called my friend to say hello and to ask her how she liked the cake.  You would think I'd given her the world (crazy though it is!) on a plate under foil!   She thanked me profusely, she told me how good it was and how much she enjoyed it and how much she appreciated it.  Such a small thing, such a small effort, a small gesture...to me.  To her, it was so much and was returned to me with such abundance of gratitude.


"It's all relative," we casually say, and it's true.  "Less is More" is another one we throw around.  Talking to my friend got me thinking about the relativity scale between smallness and abundance, and how life and age force us to slide from one end of the scale to another.  Hopefully, as we grow older we do indeed grow wiser and learn that abundance is not the "be all and end all" and that, in fact, abundance is often disguised in smallness.  Abundance is not a very good teacher, either, if the lesson is how to truly value and appreciate any thing.  Anyone who has ever spent Christmas morning with children has witnessed this lesson in action.   No one gift can be truly appreciated, explored, or enjoyed when there is so much more to rip open!  When we have abundance of any thing, it is so hard (perhaps humanly impossible) to keep that sense of value.  When you've got that full gallon of milk in the fridge, you don't stress over the milk left behind in the glass or splashed carelessly on the counter quite so much as the morning when you've got to eek out enough for everyone's breakfast and you're running low.  When you've got that full box of kleenex, you just whip through them without really using them as well as you could, which you wouldn't do if you were getting down to the end with no backup in the linen closet.  It's just how we are...and The World sure doesn't help...we are so encouraged to want more of everything!  But my older and wiser friend knows better.  She knows that having the wedge of chocolate cake is every bit as good as having the entire cake...and eating it too!  She knows, too, that the friendship with which the cake was served is so much more satisfying than those mouthfuls of chocolate and sugar, good as they are.


We should all be blessed with older friends.  They have so much to teach us, without even trying, but just by their being.  Old age necessarily means "down sizing," and this is so much more than just moving to a condo and pitching the extra furniture.  Old age means losing some things, a lot actually,  in every area of life.  But, I think, the truly wise old person can find the gain inside the loss.  Like my friend, that person can deeply appreciate the value and the greatness in less, in their "downsized" Slice of Life, perhaps even more than they did when they had "so much more."  It's not easy, but it can be done and can deliver abundant joy...on a plate!  It would probably work with English Trifle, too!

Thanks for reading.  Let it steep!