I have given a lot of bad news these last couple of weeks. I’ve given some good news, too, but those instances have been far less frequent. I’ve sat at my patients’ bedside and listened as they shared their stories, their pain, and their fears. I’ve passed the tissue box, filled with papery wisps of cheap, hospital-grade tissue. I have come close to tears, and I have discretely wiped away tears. And I’ve held many, many hands: wrinkled, slender, 80-year old hands; husky, calloused, 50-year old hands; tattooed, tanned, 27-year old hands; swollen and puffy hands; arthritic and knobby hands; jaundiced hands; bruised hands.

I’ve driven home each night, well after my children have eaten dinner and had their showers. The recorded voice reading The Book Thief on audiobook has kept me company. On better days, I’m able to concentrate on the story, on Markus Zusak’s beautiful way with words, on his descriptions and analogies that seem to brilliantly mix the senses.

“The orange flames waved at the crowd as paper and print dissolved inside them. Burning words were torn from their sentences.”    (from The Book Thief)

Oh, his words are strung together in such a stunning way, as if they were always meant to be together in just that order. I freely admit, I’m more than a little jealous of the author’s talent.

I should not be sharing a cake recipe with you today, this second Monday of January. Or on any day in January, for that matter.

January, according to the food magazines that have arrived in my mailbox, is a month for dietary restraint. A whole cadre of food blogs and cooking sites – and Pinterest, for goodness sake – agree. This first month of the year is the month for salads and for kale (though, it always seems to be the month for kale), for quinoa and farro, for lean proteins and grapefruit and cauliflower. It is the month for food cleanses and for juicing and for detoxing. January is the month we should be cutting calories, curtailing portion sizes, and shedding the Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Year’s Eve-weight gain.

Let me reassure you: I’m entirely okay with healthy eating. In fact, I prefer to eat healthy most days of the week.

Once upon a January day, after too many days in a row stuck at home, the mother decided to drag her children out of the house. She had tried this the day before, and she only succeeded in getting her kids to go out to lunch with her.

“It’s too cold to go outside,” they whined.

The day before that, she forced them to walk outside with her, just a quick walk around the block.

“It’s too rainy to go outside,” they said. The rain had stopped, but it was overcast, and they were being whiny and mopey. The daughter refused to walk beside the mother and the son. She was not happy, not one bit, that she was outdoors, against her will.  Such a mean mommy she had.

The children preferred to bury their noses in Minecraft and Animal Jam. The mother did not understand why building pixel-block worlds with square animals was better than kicking rocks, splashing in puddles, and riding the awesome bikes (bikes with gears!) that Santa brought for Christmas. She did not understand Animal Jam at all, and she hated National Geographic, just a little bit, for creating the site.  She did not understand these children.