Writer wins award for her tale of first love
Ah, the timeless taste of first love. Cambridge-born Becky Blake — the one-time short order cook at Doon Valley Golf Course in Kitchener who just won the CBC Nonfiction Prize for her short story “Trust Exercise” — recalls the heart-fluttering flavour well in 1,332 award-winning words.
It’s not at all like the lumpy vichyssoise her teenage sweetheart Anton asked her to make in exchange for their first smooch two decades ago.
“It’s more like strawberry cream cheese pie,” Blake said. “Which is finally how I won him over. My vichyssoise was a big flop.”
Yes, the sweet pie she says she probably learned to bake in the kitchen of the golf course tucked in a snapping-turtle bend in the Grand River. Anton bit and forked over that first kiss. Food is love. Food is salivation. Food is motivation.
“The impetus for this piece was a friend (Eufemia Fantetti) asked me to write something about food for her book launch,” said Blake, who moved to Kitchener at 13 and went to Cameron Heights for high school. “Her book is called ‘A Recipe for Disaster.’ As soon as I sat down to write something about food, this story came out.”
“Trust Exercise” is peppered with local appetizers hand-picked from Blake’s Kitchener memories and packaged in a hearty three-page tale (www.cbc.ca/books/literaryprizes/trust-exercise-by-beckyblake-1.4265706).
There are Honey Nut Cheerios and House of Friendship food hampers packed with peanut butter, jalapeno peppers and diet drink crystals. Horseradish gives way to chocolate-coated biscuit sticks of the Japanese snack Pocky. There are mouldy vegetables, tuna casseroles, unpeeled kiwi fruit and movie-theatre popcorn.
It’s a sentimental smorgasbord, featuring Mennonite caterers, theatre school clowns and trips to the downtown Farmers Market. It was judged the best of 1,400 entries.
“I always associated love and food together,” said Blake, who won the CBC Short Story Prize in 2013. “I can think of a few stories about Anton that involve food. And when I sat down to write, they just kept coming and coming. All these different memories and the things we ate together.” But first loves rarely endure. Anton — his name was changed to protect the romantically innocent — and Blake went their separate ways. She’s finishing her first novel, “Scratch,” which is due in 2019. She’s not sure where Anton is. She wonders if he’ll read this story, their story, and find her recollections true and accurate.
“I hope, if he reads it, he can see that it’s in a spirit of kind of celebrating what we had and a little bit apologizing to him, too,” said Blake, a former Halifax journalist and a one-time advice columnist for a men’s website in Toronto.
“I’ve always felt kind of bad about breaking his trust. This is sort of meant as an apology, and also to kind of capture the sweeter parts of our relationship.”
She’s got an idea of how to spend part of the $6,000 Canada Council of the Arts prize she gets for her story that will also appear in Air Canada’s enRoute magazine. She hopes Anton is hungry for a reunion. “I would be very happy to take him out for a very fancy dinner with my prize money, if he was interested,” Blake said.
“He could choose. I would take him anywhere.”
Some place where the vichyssoise is as smooth and silky as the fading memory of a first kiss. And the strawberry cream cheese pie is as enchanting as first love.