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“The cut’s deep. The doctor here basically told me if I wasn’t so muscular, I might be dead or paralyzed,” Pham told reporters a few months later at spring training.

If I avoid looking into a mirror and take a bite, I am my nineteen year old self — sun bleached locks framing my face, leaner and more muscular — always somewhere close to a water’s edge.

It was a stance that the Rev. Munther Isaac, a Lutheran pastor in Bethlehem, saw as a counterweight to the muscular brand of conservative Christianity increasingly dominating U.S. discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

That was the muscular foreign policy promoted by the cold warriors and neoconservatives.

Not the delicate meringues or the aggressively frosted cupcakes of childhood birthday parties, but the muscular, memory-laced ones.