Just Desserts

The Saturday night Gathering in January was just full of great energy. Was it the food? Was it the process? Was it the people? Was it the music and dancing? Was it the warm fire? Was it a combination or all of these? Who knows. I only know that it was a great night.

Personally, it was the food that did it for me. Sometimes our culinary spread is sparse, but not that night. The desserts (again, my personal favorites) were wonderful, including two cakes! Only the dessert buffet at a Las Vegas hotel could have been better. Or maybe the midnight dessert buffet on a cruise ship sailing by a lava flow dumping into the sea in Hawaii. That was fun too. I am sorry, but I do not have the space to tell all of my dessert stories.

For other people, the highlight of the Gathering was connecting with new and old Shalom friends. Personally, I do not like people much. Desserts are so much more dependable. I have never met a jelly donut that I did not like. Glazed crullers do not fail to return your phone calls. Coffee cake muffins do not break your heart. Molten chocolate cake with crème anglaise asks nothing of you but ecstasy.

Only 13 folks showed up for the December Gathering and your editor was discouraged. We had a wonderful night creating a special altar and so many missed it. Why don’t they come? How can we lure them in? Are we doing the wrong things? We know that you cannot get this intimacy anywhere else. Why wouldn’t they want to be there?

These were the questions that swirled in the small mind of your editor. Ergo, the sensitive headline was planned -WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU? - a real attention grabber that surely would turn the tide (and set off your Net Nanny.)

But you anticipated and responded in advance of such a gutter like, scandalous, cheap, journalistic device. You came to the January Gathering in all of your glory and spared your editor from embarrassing himself. Of course, it is hard to embarrass him. After the fifth Krispy Kreme he does not feel a thing.