Life Is Burnt Toast

All things work for me exactly as I envision them. Said me never.

I am, however, remarkably reluctant to give up on a piece of burnt toast.

There is something about standing over the kitchen sink with a butter knife, gently scraping away the charred parts, watching the little burnt embers fall into the basin, that makes throwing the whole thing away seem unnecessarily defeatist. There is perfectly good toast under there. I know there is. I just have to find it.

Sometimes I'm right. The black gives way to brown, the brown to something almost golden, and if I haven't scraped too enthusiastically, what remains is dry and perfectly respectable. Butter helps. Good jam can cover a multitude of sins.

Other times, the toast remains a little crusty around the edges and carries the faint flavor of a campfire, which leads to a sort of rock-paper-scissors mentality. How much like a campfire? Roasted marshmallow scorched or beyond repair? Is this rustic or ruined? Would blackberry jam help? I have been known to negotiate with myself over less.

The worst, though—the absolute worst—is when you've spent all that time scraping away the evidence of your small domestic disaster only to discover that underneath the ashes, the bread has gone inexplicably soft and damp.

Gross toast sweat.

Burnt and soggy at the same time seems both physically unfair and unnecessarily cruel. That's when I throw the damn toast away.

I wasn't always very good at that last part. For much of my life, I have been more inclined to stand over the sink scraping. A relationship, a plan, a career, a dream, a version of myself I was quite certain would work if I could just get beneath the scorched parts. Surely there was something salvageable under there.

Often, there was. Sometimes, there wasn't.

The trouble is, persistence gets excellent press. We admire people who hang in there, stick it out, refuse to quit, get back on the horse, weather the storm, climb the mountain, keep the faith. I believe in most of those things. I have built large portions of my life around most of those things.

Nobody cross-stitches Susan, throw away the damn toast onto a pillow.

Maybe somebody should.

Mom would have eaten the toast, or insisted somebody eat it. She came from a generation that did not throw away perfectly good anything, and the definition of perfectly good could be stretched considerably farther than I thought reasonable. A scorched piece of bread was hardly a crisis. Scrape it. Butter it. Eat it. Move on.

There is something admirable in that, and something of her in me every time I stand at the sink scraping. Maybe that's one reason letting go has never come particularly naturally to me. I was raised to look for what was still good.

And there usually is something, which is what makes it complicated. There is a peculiar seduction in believing that anything can be saved if you are willing to work hard enough at saving it. Scrape a little more. Be more patient. Try another angle. Add more butter. Buy better jam.

Sometimes that is exactly what life asks of us. There are things worth fighting for, waiting for, forgiving, rebuilding. There are seasons that look scorched from the outside but still have something warm underneath. There are disappointments that soften with time, mistakes that can be repaired, plans that can be redrawn and people who deserve another chance.

I've lived enough life to be grateful I didn't throw everything away the first time I smelled smoke, but I've also lived enough to know that not every charcoaled thing is waiting for me to rescue it.

That one took longer, perhaps because throwing something away can look suspiciously like failure, particularly to those of us who have spent a lifetime believing that if we just try hard enough, love hard enough, pray hard enough, work hard enough, or hold on long enough, we can eventually make things turn out the way we envisioned them.

All things work for me exactly as I envision them.

Still said me never.

Faith, I've discovered, doesn't promise me that. It doesn't promise that everything I love will last, that every prayer will be answered the way I want it answered, or that enough faith will somehow keep the toast from burning.

What it gives me is somewhere to stand when it does.

I haven't always recognized that while the smoke was still in the room. Hindsight is terribly generous that way. It lets us look backward and discover a path through something that, while we were living it, looked like nothing more than a mess. Plans changed. Doors closed. People left. I left. Things I was absolutely certain I wanted became things I was eventually grateful I didn't get, although I would like the record to reflect that I was not always gracious during the transition.

There have been prayers I thought God answered incorrectly.

I realize how that sounds, but still, there I was, explaining what I wanted, sometimes in considerable detail, only to discover that apparently I was not in charge of logistics. This remains mildly irritating. It has also, on occasion, saved me from myself.

Not everything that went differently than I prayed for became something better. I don't believe that, and I won't pretend I do. There are losses I would undo in a heartbeat if heaven handed me the eraser. Faith doesn't require me to call those things good. It asks something harder of me: to believe that goodness can still exist beside them.

Maybe that's another reason I keep scraping—not because everything underneath the burned places can be restored to what it was, but because I have seen enough to know that ruined and beautiful are not always opposites. Sometimes I scraped. Sometimes I added jam. Sometimes I stood there far too long trying to convince myself that the unmistakable taste of charcoal was merely artisanal. And sometimes, finally, I made another piece.

That's the part of resilience we don't talk about enough. Resilience isn't endlessly salvaging what's burned. Sometimes resilience is knowing when to stop scraping. There is courage in staying, but there is also courage in starting over, and I have needed both. The trick, of course, is knowing which one the toast requires, and I wish I could tell you I've mastered that.

I have not.

I still hold on too long sometimes. I still believe effort ought to count for more than it does. I still find myself staring at some disappointing thing in my life thinking surely there is a little golden patch under there if I just scrape carefully enough.

Sometimes there is, and when there is, I'm glad I looked for it.

Life is very rarely the beautifully buttered piece of toast they photograph for the menu. Mine certainly hasn't been. Parts have been golden and warm and exactly what I ordered. Parts have arrived burned around the edges. A few have tasted faintly of campfire ash, and some have required enough jam that we might as well stop pretending we were eating toast at all.

There have also been times when I scraped and scraped only to discover toast sweat. Those are the times I wish I had learned sooner that throwing away the toast isn't the same thing as giving up. Sometimes it just means you're finally willing to make another piece.

And here's the funny thing about another piece: you still have to put it in the toaster. You still have to risk burning it. There is no guarantee that the next relationship, plan, dream, adventure, job, house, friendship, haircut, recipe, or grand idea won't come popping back up with smoke curling from the edges.

You make it anyway.

I think that's the part I've finally begun to understand. The point isn't to live an unburnt life. I'm not sure there is such a thing. Maybe the point is to become a little less afraid of the smoke—to know what can be scraped and what deserves really good jam, to recognize toast sweat when you see it and quit pretending another pass with the butter knife is going to fix it. To trust yourself enough to throw away what cannot be saved, and to trust God enough to believe that what comes next does not have to look like what came before.

Although, speaking of smoke, I should probably tell you about Mom's toaster oven.

She'd had the thing for something like seventeen years when I walked into the kitchen one day and saw black smoke beginning to billow from the back of it. I called 911, because black smoke coming from an electrical appliance seemed to me like exactly the sort of thing one should not take a wait-and-see approach to.

The operator asked a series of clarifying questions and eventually suggested that I unplug the toaster oven and put it outside, which I did, setting it on the picnic table on the porch.

Crisis averted.

I went back downstairs to whatever I'd been doing before the toaster tried to burn the house down. A little while later, I smelled smoke again. Now I was worried we had an electrical fire in the wall, so I hurried back upstairs, sniffing my way toward the kitchen, where I discovered there was no fire in the wall.

There was Mary Sue.

She had gone outside, retrieved the smoking toaster from the picnic table, carried it back into the kitchen, plugged it in and resumed using it.

Apparently, we were attempting resuscitation.

She liked that toaster.

I pointed out it had just been smoking. She knew. I explained that the 911 operator had told me to unplug it and put it outside. She knew that, too. I stressed that electrical appliances generally should not produce black smoke and that continuing to use one after it does so could burn the house down.

She did not want a new toaster. She wanted that one.

No amount of pleading, reasoning or pointing out the obvious fire hazard persuaded her otherwise. It was a ridiculous little mother-daughter war. I won because I had a car and the dump was still open.

I ordered her a bigger toaster oven that same day. This new model came with a cool-touch handle, a rack that slid out when she opened the door and—most important to the daughter of a woman who had just retrieved a smoking appliance from the porch—an automatic shutoff.

She wasn't particularly impressed.

All of which may explain why, after an entire lifetime of learning when to hold on and when to let go, I still sometimes stand over the trash wondering whether I've given up too soon. I come by it honestly.

These days, I can throw away the toast. I can even throw away the toaster.

But apparently, I cannot do either without standing there for a minute wondering if I should've tried a little harder.

Perfectly good toast.

Probably could've put some jam on it.

And somewhere in a landfill, according to my mother, is a perfectly good toaster oven.