Lasagna, Redeemed

True story. Unfortunately. 

I felt accomplished when we left for church. A gigantic salad crisped in the fridge. Homemade French bread was sliced, seasoned, and reassembled into a garlic loaf. A gooey chocolate dessert called enticingly from the counter. Best of all, a gorgeous, meaty lasagna waited in the oven on Delayed Time Bake, a feature that would give us a table-ready dinner when we walked in the door. 

It was important to have our food ready immediately upon arrival because three Brazilian schoolteachers would be with us. They had a tight schedule and needed to leave by 2:00, which wouldn’t give us much time together.

Our link to the Brazilians was through the University of Delaware. International students who came to university to learn English could sign up to receive a host family. As hosts, we brought them to our home twice a month so they could practice English, visit an American family, and learn more about our culture. We enjoyed our interaction with them so much that on this occasion, we invited church friends to come for lunch and share the fun of a multi-cultural friendship.

When we got home from church, the Brazilian ladies stopped by our Rose of Sharon to take selfies and group portraits. I smiled, enjoying their laughter and rapid Portuguese.

And then I saw John at the front door. His eyes sent frantic messages I could not understand.

As soon as I stepped within whispering range, John said, “Something smells burnt.”

My lasagna.

John opened the front door, and from the smell that wafted onto the porch and down to the Rose of Sharon, I knew our lunch was in serious trouble.

I crept to the oven, scarcely brave enough to look inside. And there was my double-sized lasagna, not just overdone but charred beyond recognition. The delayed start had malfunctioned, and the lasagna baked for the entire four hours we were gone. I pulled the pan from the oven and surveyed it with morbid fascination. My beautiful lasagna was now a solid, black rectangle that thumped woodenly when I tapped it. Later, it would slip from the pan in one piece, an astonishing specimen of cookery-gone-bad.

But now, guests streamed through the front door, directly into the kitchen and within sight of their ruined lunch. Chefs in small houses have no secrets. Oh well. I wasn’t going to be like my relative who apologized profusely over every recipe she served. I decided to face the obvious with good humor.

“My oven malfunctioned,” I said to the Brazilian ladies, hoping their grasp on English was robust enough to understand. “But don’t worry. I will make something else.”

I ran to the basement for home-canned spaghetti sauce. I stirred every spaghetti noodle I owned into boiling water, praying God to multiply the amount and to please, please erase the memory of this culinary disaster from our guests’ minds. It would be humiliating to be remembered internationally by an inedible lunch.

I served the meal, poured water, and offered extra Parmesan. I brewed coffee and took comfort in the happy chatter of my guests. It sounded like things were turning out all right. Who could know? Maybe the lasagna would be a darker memory to me than it was to our friends.

But before I got too comfortable with this idea, I saw the visiting children hovering curiously around the lasagna. Their mother is my good friend and a renowned cook who doesn’t burn Sunday dinners to this degree.

“Was this—was this real food?” a pixie-like girl asked. She pointed at the pan with a milk-white forefinger.

“Yes. It was your lunch.”

“Oh.” Her voice was small.

“Was it—was it our dessert?”

Five years later, the host program closed (no reflection on the lasagna), terminating our flow of international guests. Our friends, the ones with the darling pixie, gave birth to a son.

Wanting to celebrate his arrival, I baked homemade French bread and used it to make garlic loaf. I tossed a gigantic salad and baked a decadent chocolate dessert. Best of all, I delivered a gorgeous, meaty lasagna to their door.

I was hardly home before my friend sent me a text saying, “Now this is real food!”

It was lasagna, redeemed.

I only regret that three Brazilian teachers hadn’t joined them for lunch. 

Bungled Birthdays

Each November, a high percentage of my friends give me cards or gifts on my birthday. I don’t know how they do it on time so consistently. I have puzzled over this for years and came up with a list of possibilities:

1.      My birthdate (11-11) is easy to remember.

2.       I am unwittingly more vocal about my birthday than most people.

3.       I associate with people who A) are uber organized, or B) have eidetic memories.

4.       Remembering birthdays on time is normal.

That last point concerns me the most. I do remember my friends’ birthdays—usually a week late. Occasionally, the reason I have remembered a birthday at all is when someone says, “For my birthday this year, my husband…” And I stand there feeling small and then smaller, knowing I have done it again.

I want to honor my friends like they honor me. I want to be thoughtful and giving, so every year I turn over a new leaf. I add Remember friends’ birthdays to my annual goal list. Because of this, my January and March friends stand a higher chance of hearing from me on their birthdays than my unfortunate June friends or, bless them, my December friends.

I used to be a secretary with acceptable accuracy and believe that birthdays shouldn’t be harder to remember than paying quarterly taxes. I tried checking for upcoming birthdays at the beginning of each month like I used to do for taxes in the office. This almost worked for the entire month of January. Turns out that Barb’s birthday is too close to the 1^st, so I even missed that one. On another year, I wrote names on my calendar, which helped a little. But then, when I missed a birthday, the name glared at me from the page, adding guilt to grief and highlighting the old question: “How long after a birthday can you give a person a present?”

This year when I underlined and highlighted Remember friends’ birthdays on my Annual Goal List, I prayed about my problem. Almost immediately, I thought of the calendar on my phone. Being a pen and paper kind of girl, I do not use the calendar on my phone for my schedule. I hate seeing a month full of quiet gray dots that signify anything from “Lunar New Year” to “Host Hospitality.” (Do they make colored dots? They should. Gray dots for days I can ignore, blue dots for important events, and blinking red lights for birthdays.)

I wouldn’t have bothered trying to use my phone calendar except I heard it has those alarms you can set. Alarms are even better than blinking dots. I spent half my morning figuring out how to enter birthdays and set alarms and the other half feeling confident and happy. Smug, even. To the surprise of all my friends, I would clamber onto the highest plains of normalcy and remember birthdays like the best of them.

I gave Lydia Ruth chocolates on her birthday in February and invited Gail to my house on hers. I gifted Sunday school students with timely tokens of my love. This business of remembering birthdays gave me a sense of accomplishment and the satisfaction of overcoming a severe fault. 

On March 31, my phone dinged, notifying me of Lydiann’s birthday. I immediately stopped what I was doing and sent her a text. I love having people in my life who freely credit God for the redemption and deliverance He has given. Lydiann is that kind of person. I blessed her for that trait and sent birthday greetings. On her birthday.

Warmth filled my whole kitchen.

Then I received this response from Lydiann: “Thank you very much! I receive your blessing. Our story really is a story of redemption. My birthday is actually May 31 and not March 31. Did you see it somewhere that I would’ve made a mistake and filled it in wrong?”

I hadn’t. I crawled to the church directory and double checked her birthdate. She was right, of course. But my embarrassment was tempered by knowing that my system—even when flawed—was working.

On the morning of April 25, my phone pinged reminding me that it was Anna’s birthday. I love Anna. She is warm and friendly, fun to chatter with, has a child in my Sunday school class, and another one due to arrive any day. I wanted to be especially sure to remember her birthday this year. I was arranging books and crayon boxes in my class area at church when she walked in. This was my moment. I launched into a cheerful, “Dah-dah dahn dahn dah dah…” to the tune of Happy Birthday.

Anna certainly seemed surprised. She was stunned into silence and appeared startled. Puzzled, even. Her husband looked amused.

My confidence wavered. “It’s your birthday today, right?”

“No, my birthday is in December. December 2, to be exact.”

I felt betrayed. Crushed. My failproof system had let me down horribly for the second time in less than a month. This time, I didn’t know what went wrong. How could I have gotten the date mixed up to this gross extent?

And then I knew. Right date. Wrong Anna. The birthday girl lives in Oklahoma. My husband only knows her as “the cheesecake lady” because for my birthday one year, Anna sent me a homemade lemon cheesecake in the mail, forever cementing her position in our minds as one of the best cheesecake bakers and best birthday gift givers ever. Hers was a birthday I planned to remember.

I apologized to Anna-at-Church and crept back to my phone to add a last name to the notification.

I haven’t abandoned my new system, but I am eyeing it skeptically. What I need to do is awaken the secretary within me and devote an entire morning to my calendar. I want to verify that each benign gray dot holds accurate, complete information and includes all my friends. This should be good news for the December birthday people, particularly Anna who might receive not just one but two greetings from me in the same year.

In the meantime, my friends, happy birthday to you all!