I sat down on the back porch, a too short message in my hands—no road ahead, none behind, just the view of my back yard fence.

Unexpected childhood memories began to rise up with the mist from the morning lawn. Associations arranged themselves in tenuous ways, blending with a memory from long gone days:

I was alone in the house but for the chocolate cake.  Temptation pulled me to it as surely as a sun into a black hole.  I was not a tall fourth grader, but I could see the chocolate cake on the kitchen counter.  I examined it from every angle.

I wanted some of that chocolate cake.  My mother, who had absolutely no time to bake cakes, even chocolate cakes, had made the cake for dessert.  Cakes were rare events.  Inevitably, because she didn’t have time, the chocolate cake held more appeal.   Since one missing piece would be obvious to everyone, and since I was the oldest, I would be blamed even if I hadn’t eaten the missing piece.  My fourth grade mind worked hard to calculate a plan that included my mouth plus the chocolate cake—certainly not the whole cake, not even half.  I only wanted one piece—a large piece if possible, but only one piece.

Closer inspection revealed something sinister.  A sinuous black line of very busy ants was carrying that chocolate cake back behind the counter and out into the front yard.  That meant, and I saw this clearly, that no one, not even my brother and sister, was going to want that cake.

There was a “China Doctrine” at our house. That doctrine involved starving Chinese kids. We were told that there was a place called China where millions of starving children would have jumped on any broccoli and spinach leftovers.  If we had little, they certainly had less.  The China Doctrine at our house dictated that every scrap of unwanted food had a Chinese orphan’s life attached to it.  A clear obligation lay ahead of me to eat at least some of that chocolate cake in memory of that kid.  I knew that that starving kid in China would have eaten every crumb–with or without ants.

My conscience was clear.  The chocolate cake was mine, providing I left a piece with some felonious ants still carrying crumbs to the yard as evidence, each and every outbound ant burdened with a brown boulder of chocolate cake.  The problem with the ants was that they were dark, a bit darker than the chocolate cake, and hard to spot even to the eager eye of a fourth grader with scientific aspirations.

Even at that age, I could apply simple logic to basic day-to-day problems.  I cut out a piece of the chocolate cake that no one was ever going to want anyway, except for the Chinese kid, and put it on a plate.  Then, more assiduously than with any frog in a high school to come, I meticulously dissected the cake.  My theory was that the ants would be busy at one end of their project and wouldn’t have time for the whole cake.

I had not counted on the unthinkable number of ants possible in any summertime California kitchen, nor on their celebrated industriousness.  I cut the cake into ever-smaller pieces.  The ants would be easier to separate from the cake if the pieces of cake were smaller.  It wasn’t too long before I possessed a plate full of very small crumbs.  Unfortunately, I also had before me a plate full of single minded black ants who had no intention of surrendering any of their chocolate cake to a fourth grader.  The fact that there were brother ants in the cake had no affect on their appetite nor their work ethic.

I also noticed that I was doing the ants a great favor by creating increasingly smaller pieces of cake.  But I could devise no other filter except to continue disassembling the chocolate cake. I really wanted that cake.  The calculus of the cake cutting began to sink in.  At some point the decreasing size of the crumbs meant that the cake was losing its identity into an infinite number of chocolate points.  It was my first pre-calculus lesson.

The only course of action was to try to pick out some of the cake crumbs from the debris—one calculated crumb at a time, in admittedly poor imitation of the ants.  While the ants could undoubtedly differentiate another ant from a crumb of chocolate cake, I had more difficulty.

It is an unfortunate truth that even ants that have been coated with chocolate cake still taste like ants.  An electric bitterness instantly raced over my tongue.  There was no chocolate taste left to enjoy.  The chocolate cake-to-ants ratio was way out of balance.  I grabbed a larger piece of cake and quickly pushed it into my mouth.  I closed my eyes and chewed as fast as I could.  The formic amperage increased in logarithmic proportion to the increased volume of ants.

A tear-wrenching bitterness took over my mouth and throat. Ants, parts of ants and chocolate cake crumbs flew across the room as I tried desperately to spit out the acrid taste.

The warming morning sun brought me from my wandering memory back to the note. The letter said she would soon marry Joe somewhere on the coast of Maine.

“Best Wishes, Sue.”

I tore up the letter, first in half, and then in half again until the pieces were too small to tear again.