Pancakes

My husband makes terrible pancakes,

but he makes them with love,

gently cracking the egg, releasing it from the shell

to flow in a plasma-like state into the bowl,

where it finds butter and sugar waiting

to receive it with flowers flour,

like he waited for me to walk to him

in my white dress, carrying calla lilies,

and I did walk, though there was no aisle, made my feet obey my mind

instead of my heart and resist the only urge to run

to someone that I’ve ever felt. So I appeared

graceful and poised on my big day

with a small ceremony, a Tuesday afternoon

with cake, champagne, and Spiderman.

We didn’t have a lot of guests (didn’t invite many—I was 34 years old, not an ingenue

who would look the part in a princess gown), not even in a church

because Gloria, my great aunt in every sense of the term,

was a retired probate judge, despite never finishing high school, and she married us

there in one of the community rooms at her condo, where she married my cousin, her son Dave, to Marsha twenty-something years earlier.

Stan Lee lived in her building, was coming in from his car when I stepped out to the ladies’ room in my tasteful ivory gown with light beadwork on the bodice.

I had no idea who he was, but after he said how beautiful I was in my gown, I invited him in for a glass of champagne.

He accepted, much to Gloria’s chagrin (she didn’t like him, thought comic books were silly and him overserved in terms of self) and everyone else’s delight.

Everyone who attended my wedding drank champagne with Spiderman on a Tuesday in January (the eleventh) in Columbia, South Carolina. They were also dealt in to a game of poker with Harry Kick, who built the original MGM Grand in Vegas. He was my father-in-law, and my eight-year-old daughter, in an age-appropriate hot pink satin dress that she picked out, took him down on the river at Texas Hold ‘Em and became last man standing. I’ve had few prouder moments.

We spent our wedding night in a B&B in Columbia before driving to Baltimore for my husband’s son’s piano recital.

When we first started dating, one night he told me he was going to make breakfast for me in the morning.

I replied, “You aren’t spending the night, so how are you making breakfast for me in the morning?”

He said he would bring it over before I left for work.

It was the heavy, unsweetened pancakes that craved butter with every molecule of their being.

It was the only time anyone has ever cooked breakfast for me and delivered it to me, still warm.

I know that too much flour goes in the batter every morning when my husband makes pancakes and takes them and the coffee he made for me to the car and starts it for me. I know it with every bite.

I know, too, that he rises before the sun to brew the coffee and make pancakes so I can sleep until six-thirty and eat my breakfast and drink my coffee at my desk, after I successfully beat the traffic. If I get stuck, I have breakfast I can eat in the car with my hands while I’m gridlocked on the interstate parking lot, calling my boss. I’m nourished because he feeds me. More so because it’s not even something I ask, just graciously given like an unexpected coudburst finishing in a double arced rainbow or a perfect sunset with fuchsia and violet melting into each other in a sea of coral against a golden background tinged with blue when you weren’t even expecting the sky to put out.

The pancakes are terrible, and I love them,

can’t bear the thought of mornings without them.