What I Ate on Sunday, June 5th and Saturday, August 20th: Raspberry Croissants & Bubble Tea

It’s been almost three months. For almost three months I’ve been meaning to write about this. About the day my niece bought me bubble tea. And not even just bought it for me — but presented it to me. Do you understand the difference between a purchase and presentation? I assume you know the difference. Nevertheless — there is a difference. An important one.

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Everything feels hard, lately. My kid is seven, so I am no longer the mom of a little child and I feel like everything should seem easier…but he still pees his pants and poops in the shower and doesn’t know how to apply sunscreen or make food — so things still seem hard. Overwhelming. I thought the difference in overwhelm between having a baby and a kid would feel so gigantic. It doesn’t.

The last time I bought bagels, I picked up a different kind. Normally, we buy egg bagels — they’re lightly tinged yellow and seem heartier than a plain bagel and make me feel like I am eating an egg folded into a piece of bread. Even when dry, they look like they have been buttered from the inside; a golden color seeping through every pore. I adore them. But last time I bought bagels, I stared at the 7 Grain bagels and decided that I should get those instead. I thought that staring at the little wheat pieces while I took a bite would make me feel like a better person. You know what it did instead? Pissed me off.

The whole time I ate the 7 Grain bagel, I was focusing on how different it was from the egg bagel. I kept staring at the little wheat grains. I was like, why doesn’t this taste like butter and eggs and fat? I wanted to taste fat. But all I could see were those little grains. And then that was all I could taste.

I have this friend. We used to feel so similar. I believe we still are similar, in all the ways that matter. But I hear her say, look how different we are now and I reply, yes. She’s talking about our lives. Our habitats. I think both of us aren’t sure they’d want what the other one has, so we take comfort in the idea about our distance.

People fucking love citing the differences between each other. If I had to bet, I bet that if a scientist put a heart monitor on people and then watched the electric waves while they said different words, that the heart would love saying “we” more than “they.” But the mouth often mocks the heart.

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Anyway. My baby boy is seven and somehow, I have a niece who is old enough and cool enough to go to the bubble tea shop and buy me a bubble tea. She bought a bubble tea almost three months ago for me. I gave her a very small window of time when I would be passing through her city, and still — she cared enough to fit that into her life and to go out and order one of the things we love together so much — for me.

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I was back in the city where my family lives this past weekend. I was there a bit longer than usual, but still not very long. About 36 hours. After oversleeping on my only full morning there, I was left with a small window of time for breakfasting.

I was panicked. I wanted a certain raspberry croissant really badly (*if you are reading this and you have ever bought a raspberry croissant — please let me know where this purchase happened. I truly cannot ever ever find them.) It was after 10am when I woke up and I worried the bakery would have sold out of them by then. My dad says no to 98% of food items offered to him, so I figured if I asked if he’d like to go get a croissant with me, he would decline my invitation. I was wrong. He met me by the door; off we went.

The bakery was not sold out of the raspberry croissants, praise Jesus. We ordered two. Then we waited approximately 200 years in line for a coffee at Starbucks and went to the park to eat them. He said he’d rather go home, and sit inside with his coffee and his food, but when it’s nice out, I refuse to eat inside unless I have to.

We grabbed a spot on a bench surrounded by geese. I kept thinking they would either bite us or distance themselves, but they did neither of the two. They stayed near, and waited for croissant pieces to fall. I’d love to lie to you and say I didn’t feed them, but I most definitely did. I got close enough to their pointy mouths to see their crazy jagged terrifying tiny rows of teeth, which was a fantastic lens into the study of ornithology, and about as far as I will likely ever take the study of ornithology.

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When I was leaving, my dad told me that he sees and loves the way I try to make people live. To make people come with me, eat with me, walk with me, share with me. That he sees me as an ambassador of life. I was so quietly proud, while he said these words. I felt — deeply and clearly — seen.

And I think that is why I was so floored on June 5th, when my niece brought me bubble tea. Not only did she want — and work towards — bringing me something I loved, but she did it with such a sincere gesture of wanting to give to me.

What time will you be here/how much sweetness do you take in your drink again/what kind of bubbles/which flavor/which type of nondairy milk do you prefer’

My niece was trying to hand me life. To turn something vague into something concrete. To take the normalcy of sugar and milk and bubbles and tea — to marry it to how much joy she knows it gives me — and to stand at the top of her porch steps at my arrival, and present it to me. She figured out how I love, and how I receive love, and dedicated herself to giving that to me.

We always think that there will be these big things in life that will feel so validating — proof of success. A job offer, a certificate, a book contract, a degree. The difference between having those things and not having them can look enormous. It might not be. I am a failure on paper, but I am an ambassador of life in my father’s eyes, and I have liquid proof that I am loved by my niece.