two

We were going to open a café in Greece together, once we were old and our husbands had died.

She had gone too Greece on holiday when she was twelve, and had talked about the street dogs relentlessly afterwards, starved, thin, injured, but so, so cute!, the poor creatures. She’d begged her mum to take one, at least one, home with her, though in her passionately righteous twelve-year-old mind, the only truly moral thing to do would have been to rescue all of them. 

It was two years later that we came up with our plan. I had recently picked up baking, and one summer weekend, we put up a stand in our neighbourhood park and made nearly two hundred pounds selling cupcakes. We were buzzing with entrepreneurial spirit after this first taste of success. We would do this every weekend of summer break from now on. Hell, why stop there? If we talked to our principal, maybe we could set up our shop once a week in school, too. We would do special holiday-themed cupcakes on Halloween and around christmas. We would take orders and cater to parties. This could be huge! It could pay for our college tuition! For trips to Europe! Maybe – who knew? – even for our very own café one day.

This was where our grandiose contemplations halted briefly. After all, she was going to be a lawyer, and while I didn’t know yet what I wanted to do, I knew it wasn’t being a full time baker. Still, the idea was too brilliant, too promising, to give up on.

We decided to delay further planning for the time being and celebrate our success by treating ourselves to a day at the waterpark and a Chinese All-You-Can-Eat buffet, at which I ate so much that I missed the next two days of school with acute gastritis.

Still, silly as it seemed when I looked back on these first drafts of our dream, it must have somehow, though we didn’t know it at the time, enchanted both of us, even then. We never did end up pursuing the idea of a regular baking stand – in fact, this remained the only instance we ever put one up at all. Instead, it was the café that stuck with us.