Dear Bread Fans,
I’m melancholy. Why, I wondered as I put on socks and zipped up my sweatshirt against the new chill in the air, can’t everyone go back where they were? Why can’t my dad be alive again? Why can’t my kids be little, and why can’t we always have lilacs?
Goodbye summer, goodbye son (freshly away at college), goodbye flowers. Even if each of you come home, I am facing absence, and that’s uncomfortable. My skin doesn’t fit. My days don’t fit. Who am I now that I’m not feeding my youngest? Listening to him? Should I pick up where I left off 25 years ago and become that elusive thing, a writer? Oh wait, I am a writer, and I’m still a mother, too. But my daily tasks are rearranging. I’m unfamiliar to myself. Aren’t we always?
I think this is why we crave things that make us feel known. Here is my coffee, here are my hands shaping bread, here is my head on my pillow, catching me at the end of a day.
As my son adjusts to being away, he’s keenly lacking here. He misses his friends and home so much that he came back last weekend, and our first meal was at Naughter’s, my favorite diner. After we ate, and were on our way to the car, we ran into a friend and went back for dessert. Over lemon meringue pie, Geri and I reminisced about Gloria’s, a luncheonette where her son and I worked one summer. It was on the same block, so we were physically close even if the memory was almost 30 years old.
Gloria was a nurse who always wanted to have a lunch spot. When her breast cancer went into remission, she opened a cozy place with a little dining room. The tables were covered in red and white checked cloths. The servers all cooked, and we made chicken salad, tuna salad, soups, desserts. Geri and I dug for why Naughter’s felt like Gloria’s, and decided that both places make/made you feel comfortable.
A year ago, I walked in to Naughter’s the first time. I admit I was suspicious. I miss our ghost town, and it’s hard to accept that my city is becoming popular. But I felt immediately welcomed by this small restaurant, with its sparkly green booth and long counter. John, the owner, sat with me for ages before I knew he was the owner.
The other night, I brought my sister there and pontificated about why the place works. Everyone needs some place to feel like the mayor, I said. I was puffed up with the thought, but later I realized that I don’t feel like a ruler at Naughter’s. I feel accepted.
That’s the key to good public places, for people to feel respected and accepted. Like we are all mayors. At the library, I get a similar greeting from the librarians and from the building. I’ve been coming here since I was a kid. The marble front, the stained glass window behind the checkout desk are familiar. I can remember being afraid of the cast iron steps in the stacks, and the glass blocks of the floor! My son has only been at school a month — that’s nowhere near long enough to find the spaces that welcome him.
I think this is why so many of us fall under the spell of baking bread. We feel welcomed, invited by the practices of baking. Flour sits on the shelf, calling psst, over here! Let’s get busy, and we do. The dough rests and grows, and we — the dough and I — make a loaf, and put it in a pan. Soon enough, the baked loaf is on the bread board, evidence and reminder of my connection with ingredients, of our shared moments. We are familiar.
As each loaf disappears, there’s comfort in the routines of toast and sandwiches. The predictable presence is soothing. We’ve known bread. We can expect it will care for us again.
That expectation and comfort, that’s what I still feel for my dad. He knew me. I know I’m lucky I had him, and that I still have my mom. I’m more than lucky that they adored each other and gave my siblings and I a good stable start. But it hurts, sometimes physically, to be growing older, as he did. And it is strange now to reckon with another change, to have a quieter house and many projects needing me, but none of them saying, with my son’s smile in the morning, hey, here I am.
The day always needs me though, and I am better when I begin by walking downtown, running into people, looking at the Hudson River and the buildings I love, the grand Victorians and the less fancy housing where the many factory workers lived. I am not glum when my legs are moving and I am surrounding myself with my familiars. When I find my welcome.
I hope you feel known and familiar, dear readers — new and old. Thank you for joining me on these flour rambles — I see a handful of you found me at the Great Lakes Grain Gathering in Ontario, where organizers put my Flour Ambassador pledge up on a screen. So sweet to see that circulating. Here is the silly, serious pledge:
I do solemnly, happily swear, that I am going to tell everyone I see that it’s okay to love flour!
Bread is not poison. Invisibility is poison. I will make visible all the labor in bread, from seed to mill, and mill to loaf.
Because mills are the levers that farmers need to get new grains in the ground, and under our butter again.
Yours, Amy
So well said, Amy, on all fronts. Missing and wishing is a routine part of the day. So is the tactile act of baking which fills the empty house with familiarity.
Dear Amy, I enjoyed your writing this morning. I'm a little further along in years than you. I now have grandchildren and yesterday we gained a new granddog. Some people in my life are growing and others are dying. I'm now facing my morality. I do find comfort in my mornng coffee, texts from my grandchildren, Fritz by my side , friends and my garden. I never really thought about places that bring me comfort but I also have them. A reastaurant in Kent where the owner welcomes you and takes the time to know you. I guess it's a two way street. We have also taken the time to know him.
I want to thank you for sharing your life and loves with your community. I'm looking forward to your next letters.