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Chapter One
In a day when you don’t come across any problems, you can be sure that you are traveling in a wrong path.
Swami Vivekananda
The Embraer 175’s wings dipped to reveal the Rocky Mountains’ whitewashed peaks as the plane bumped east toward Denver. Snow clouds hung heavy in the Colorado sky, muting the fading sunset and reducing the landscape to gunmetal gray. Feathers of ice stroked Melinda Sen’s window and she wrapped her green-and-gold dupatta more tightly around herself. It was December and she was almost home.
Gauzy, gray-white curtains of snow hovered over the Front Range, visible on her left. Melinda’s eyes traced the frozen world below as she worried the gold Chandi goddess pendant at her sternum. Forecasters predicted nasty weather tonight, even threatening blizzard conditions in parts of the foothills. Fortunately, her condo was at the base of the mountains near Golden, so she shouldn’t be cut off from civilization. Still, she was eager to collect her car from the Park & Ride and get home safely.
Melinda shivered beneath her layers and rubbed her calves together. Note to self: don’t cuddle the fuselage next time.
The plane sank and the pilot announced their imminent arrival. Plane landings reminded Melinda of the giddy, weightless feeling of a descending elevator, and her jacket hid her smile as she resisted the urge to jump in the aisle. Then, as usual, she wondered, Could I blog about that? Was there a parallel with food in there somewhere? What in the kitchen could possibly correlate to the childhood game of achieving a split second of weightlessness in an elevator by jumping as it reached its destination? And then, by extension, by jumping in a plane as it descended from the sky?
Obviously there’d be sprinkles. Melinda giggled out loud. The man in the aisle seat next to her hiked his eyebrows at his Reader’s Digest.
“Sprinkles,” she whispered, conspirator to conspirator.
Nope. Digest man spared her a sidelong glance, then pointedly continued reading, and Melinda glared at him before returning to the growing darkness outside her window. Sorry you have no imagination, Magazine Man.
Her wandering train of thought chugged along. No, not sprinkles. Wasabi. Intensity followed by a lift—perfect. Melinda sighed and sat back in her seat, food parallel achieved, and just in time.
The cabin lights flickered and dimmed, flight attendants collected stray cups and coffee sticks, and the captain wrestled more turbulence. Melinda dug her thumb into the nickel-sized metal button controlling her seat’s angle and her seatback lurched forward. Sprinkles indeed.
They dropped lower.
Denver International Airport’s peaked tents filled her window for a split second, then the plane angled into the wind and the airport vanished. Melinda sized up the clouds lying in wait over the Front Range. Heavy, gray, looming. Not comforting, as adjectives went. Hold off for another hour, could you?
The natural light was almost gone and the earth grew closer and closer, larger and larger. The landscape blurred into shadow and indistinguishable shapes raced below her window. Runway lights flashed into view. The plane hit the ground with a force that jerked her head back. As they taxied to the gate, Melinda breathed a sigh of relief, despite how far from home she still was. Somewhere in her future were a glass of wine, a pair of clean pajamas, and hopefully a cooking show where contestants made cakes in the shapes of Michelangelo’s David or double-decker buses. She wriggled her toes in her boots.
The quick weekend trip hadn’t warranted checked luggage, so when her turn came, Melinda shouldered her black leather duffel bag and deplaned, bound for ground transportation. As an amorphous herd, the passengers tromped up the gangway and through Terminal C until a restroom beckoned, and she and a few others broke off. Melinda used the bathroom, took a quick sink bath, and rejoined foot traffic toward the underground train.
Tired faces droned past hers as she reviewed the conference that had taken her to Salt Lake City, an event so jam-packed she’d not showered for the two and a half days. She’d gone to the food blogging mega-expo because the organizers embraced weird and unusual subject matter. Her blog, A Wing and A Prayer Kitchen, was more of a cooking adventure blog, and it lacked the socially sexy perfect meal in under thirty minutes concept. Instead, Melinda tackled projects like “It’s 5 p.m. And Your Fridge Is Empty, What Do You Do—WHAT DO YOU DO?”
She contributed a monthly column in Denver’s lifestyle rag, Mile High Home Magazine, and a weekly experiment in her own kitchen landed on her blog. Her motto was “Let go and let it get good.” As mottos went, it was a bit optimistic but somewhat truthful. Her concoctions were unplanned, undirected, and unsophisticated. She enjoyed highlighting issues her readers faced on a daily basis, like lack of time, lack of equipment, lack of essential ingredients, and turning them into success stories. Or humorous failures, she freely admitted. No matter what, it was a niche angle, it was her social outlet, and monetizing it paid the bills.
Melinda took her place on the moving walkway. Food bloggers were a funny bunch. Obsessed, enthusiastic, at times relentless—that was the world of food blogging. Crazy about finding the next big trend and cultivating an ever-growing following. Melinda boarded the train and contemplated semicolons. The right way to use them, the wrong way to use them, their relevance, or not, in five-hundred-word-maximum blogs that used words like “spicetastic” and “zingalicious.” She gripped the train’s support post as thousands of small propellers in the Kinetic Light Air Curtain installation spun in time with her mind.
She sighed. Semicolons weren’t the conference’s real takeaway. Neither were the quick coffee dates with the other bloggers, though it had been fun to put faces to the screen names.
Melinda had seen the writing on the wall, and it wasn’t pretty.
Her work was cold. Forced. Heartless, even.
How was that even possible? Melinda stomped her foot and turned away from the surprised faces of fellow passengers. Despite aiming so artfully for laissez-faire breeziness, the conference speakers had shown her, through their own passion, that she was phoning it in. So irritating! Weren’t her quirky approach and punchy language enough?
Apparently not.
Apparently she was closed off. Skilled but forgettable. Pretending to be happy but patently fake. Trying to sparkle as she fell flat.
She may or may not have audibly growled. The woman to her left took a slow step backward.
Melinda forced her mind back to the conference. What did they know, anyway? She enjoyed what she did! Didn’t she? Inspiring non-cooks to pick up a spatula interested and challenged her. Why did someone hate cooking one minute, then tackle pasta fagioli the next? That brave, uncertain moment in someone’s day, or week, or life piqued her curiosity.
Did she obsess just a little about what they thought of her? Maybe. But a business owner should engage with her clients. So what if she didn’t have that many friends outside of her blog? Hearing from readers was very rewarding. And if she worked late enough into the night she could almost pretend she had a social life.
Melinda was proud that she managed her own social media platforms, all stinking day long, and she celebrated her readers’ attempts to cook along with her. She cared about their process. She enjoyed her readers. That should count for something. She grimaced. But did she care too much? What if she was codependent with her readers?
And a warm welcome back, Doctor Sen.Her therapist mother’s parlance reared its unwelcome head. Melinda hadn’t spoken with her mother in two years, yet never failed to recall Katrina’s pedantic pearls of wisdom when life got complicated. Insipid word, “codependent.”
