Cakes and candles for Bonnie

I have to type with my face just inches in front of the screen, because if I try to do it with my lenses in they very quickly get so blurred up that I can't see a thing.

One of the things that had gone through my head Friday morning was that I should actually put something *new* for once on my old Church of Bonnie Bedford Pink-Fuzzy Homeschooling Page to make Bonnie laugh. Then in the late afternoon/early evening when I had given up on getting any more work done that day and was starting to redo some of *Sam's* web pages, Tia's message came through. I'm the person who freaks out whenever I see *anyone*'s name in a subject line -- expecting it to say that they died -- so here I did the opposite: *desperately* hoped for any chance that the "gone" would mean "gone on a trip" or even "gone to the hospital." Bonnie just *couldn't* be dead *already*.

I didn't want to lay around the house crying, so I pulled on my pink-fuzzy boots and walked down to the ocean with Arthur (Sam had a big headache) and walked along the coast for a while. It was Bonnie's ocean too. I felt like I should have something to throw into the ocean but didn't know what. For some reason I remembered Bonnie posting "Man I'd love to eat cake" back in May (when I'd gotten her message I'd felt guilty for not having thought about the fact that she was fasting before having posted about an evening of wandering around missing buses and eating cake), and thought: "I'll make you a big chocolate cake with candles all over it."

Suddenly I remembered that it had been spring of last year that Bonnie had posted about it being her birthday, finding a new lump, cutting her hair and starting a fast, so this meant that she'd just had another birthday in the midst of all this mess ... arrgh ... so I felt doubly driven to go home and make a fancy cake and light many candles on it for Bonnie, it was the only thing that was making any sense to me.

But when I got back and could get into the kitchen, I just kept looking at the cookbooks, and looking at the ingredients, and feeling sick to my stomach and tired, and like I couldn't think straight, and just not getting anywhere. I finally decided that I didn't have enough ingredients, that I would have to go get some more and make the cake on Saturday instead.

So yesterday I made this very rich bittersweet chocolate cake I used to make, and that went fine, but on the frosting end of things, alas, my perfect recipe for fudge frosting is written inside a book buried somewhere inside the garage, so I had to try to pick something similar from my big pile of cookbooks. The frosting seemed to be going fine, but then when it had cooled and I was beating it it started getting *really* thick, and as soon as I started trying to spread it between the layers it all turned completely solid. I thought "Oh Bonnie, this was supposed to be so perfect!" and quickly made the all-purpose-in-case-of-emergencies "melt together a bag of NOT NESTLE chocolate chips and a stick of butter" frosting instead, and I just covered the cake with candles, including a bunch of the trick candles that relight themselves after you blow them out.

Sam had two friends over for a sleepover, so I called them all into the kitchen to help me, along with Arthur. As soon as Sam saw the cake he said, "*Oh*. This must be a 'goodbye Bonnie' cake." He turned out all the lights, and his friends helped me light all the candles. Then they were trying to blow them out, with Sam holding Arthur up, but the relighting candles kept relighting and so burned all the way down. Then they went back to Sam's room, and I relit all the normal candles and talked to Bonnie. All the flames and the tendrils of smoke were quite a sight in the dark room.

When I ate a piece of the cake I imagined Bonnie eating one too and could picture her saying in a friendly way "it was OK", despite the absence of the really-good frosting. I wondered whether I should make another cake for the home-ed party in two weeks and let everyone who wanted to light candles, or if it would be too intense.

It's so easy to feel myself slipping in and out of the mindset that Bonnie is dead -- it would still seem like the most natural thing in the world to see a letter from her show up in my mailbox about how she went to the hospital and it was a big pain in the ass (and then think "oops, here's Bonnie writing again and I still haven't finished that silly gossip message I was writing her last week"). Looking at Bonnie's web pages, too, it's easy to feel like she's still *right there* ... until you look at her guestbook, anyway -- the almost exactly two years worth of messages expressing appreciation for Bonnie's work is now being led by a growing parade of anguished messages, some of them left by some of the same people who left the very first comments two years ago.