Sara Lee Lubin

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a bakery at dawn, a mixer turning slow)
There is a girl. There was a girl. She's real. Start there.

[Verse 1]
Charlie Lubin had a bakery and a cheesecake he'd perfected,
and he wanted it to have a name that people would remember,
and he looked across the kitchen at his daughter, who was eight,
and he said: that one. Her name. And he wrote it on the crate.
Nineteen forty-nine. Sara Lee. That's her.
That is a girl with a birthday and a bedroom and a chair.

[Chorus]
Sara Lee Lubin. Sara Lee Lubin.
Everybody in the country knows the first part of your name.
Nobody knows the last. Nobody knows there IS a last.
Nobody knows you grew up, or what you thought about it, or that
you are a person who got handed something enormous at eight
and had to carry it the whole way. Sara Lee Lubin.

[Verse 2]
"Nobody doesn't like Sara Lee." That's the line. That's the jingle.
Say that to a child. Say that to a girl in middle school.
Nobody doesn't like you — everybody in America
has an opinion on your name and it's supposed to be a compliment.
I don't know what that's like. I genuinely don't.
I've thought about it for a while and I still don't.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And it's a kindness, at the root of it — a father and a cake
and a way of saying: you are the best thing that I make.
That's not nothing. That's a love letter in a freezer aisle,
signed in a font, in every shop, for the rest of natural time.
Both things are true at once. It's tender and it's heavy.
Most love is. Most love is exactly that.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the mixer stops)
She's a person.
She was eight.