During my first week in this country, the toaster would consistently propel one piece of bread out, and it would almost always end up against the wall. (Well, sometimes it goes the other way.)

It is reassuring to know that bread does jump out of toasters in real life. that it’s not just something that happens in cartoons.

(funny, the things each person finds reassuring. we can both look at the same thing, and you may leap in satisfaction while I grieve, at what happens, at what doesn’t happen)

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Perhaps it promises a quiet moment between dream and wakefulness. when the sun is halfway up but the brightness is not too invasive, when things are still soft around the edges, soft, mallible and kind. The sunlight came through the kitchen window almost horizontal, pale and translucent, like a stage trick.

Perhaps it is a promise of mundaneness and the end of striving, of becoming soft and blurry around the edges, of melting like clocks among burning giraffes.

. There is a strange reassurance that comes from fishing the bread out of the space that it lands between the toaster and the wall. And there is a calming numbness in waiting for the bread to jump out, like sitting at the passenger seat of my mother’s car on the way home at the end of a week from school. A time that’s placid, in­between, like a doctor’s waiting room.

Not here, and not quite there.

When time stands still, and it stretches until it becomes a very thin layer of eternity, and you get to disappear.

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The idea of a toaster seemed exotic to me as a child; ghosts, figments, of the American middle class, drifting all the way to China, carried by cartoons like a folklore hero; much like the idea of christmas, which was hardly more than a blurry image of snow, multi­colored lights, and a fat old man dressed in red and white in honor of coco­cola. Something you have a vague idea of ­ no more than a vague idea of.

That vagueness is key. That vagueness is attractive. That vagueness allows imagination to infiltrate from the cracks, so as to be so tied down to reality. Instead, it bumps merrily along the way like balloons and can be persuaded to become dogs.

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Eating is reassuring. being one of the few ways to halt the obssessive machinery in the mind that never quite stops. only the crack in time when celestial procession yields to the incessent, jerky, machenical movements of the jaw.

eating is reassuring. sleep is reassuring. pain is reassuring. (Funny, what each person finds reassuring. Things that doesn’t change, or pretend not to. Things that very much does change, and make a show of it.)

One winter, I went back home after being away for four months. I walked down the streets outside, looking at the trees,and I felt very sad;

it was as if I had never been away. that nothing had changed The solid things like trees, and shops, and people staring back at me.The mundaneness of it all hurt me like a recurring nightmare.

. Whether or not the bread jumps on depends on many factors: bread type, bread moisture levels, bread shape, heat levels, the mood the toaster happens to be in on that day, etc.

I was going to experiment on all these variables and write a guidebook for making your own bread fly at home.

One morning, the heating mechanism got short­circuited mid-operation. Since then it only heats up the bread on one side. This morning, it broke altogether. that really messed up the prospect of a guidebook.