A Story of Bread
I bought some ready lentil soup from the neighborhood market. It’s awesome. Bought some French Bread and a few other items I needed, checked out and went home. Tasted the soup right away. Yes!
Put the stuff away in the fridge and notice I hadn’t noticed …the bread.
Arrrghhh.
Small upset really. Called them and they said they had it, blah blah and I said thanks-I’ll be in a little later. Damn.
You see I have developed a strategy to avoid, crowds and congestion. I do my “to dos” that require things from stores, or dr. appts, grocery shopping , etc. between ten and two o'clock.
It was three thirty now and I thought I was done “OUT THERE”. That’s hw I usually refer to the world at large these days. With dread like Maynard G. Krebs said, “WORk”.
Okay I thought. I’ll ride the bike. I need the exercise but first let’s smoke a bowl for the ride and listen to Pandora through my hearing aids (ah-technology…can’t live with it, can’t live without it.
Two miles max but of course there’s a good Santa Anna headwind which comes out of the desert and blows all of our smog out to sea. Whatever.
I make it there of course and they are ready for me. The young security guard recognized me from earlier, smile and made a comment about bread. So of course being a lonely old codger, explained how it was the bread that thought of having lentil soup so…
We went on for a while about our mutual admiration for “fresh” bread. I told him I usually freeze half of the baguette which keeps it pretty authentic once reheated carefully. But then I remembered the most important and relevant thing I learned in all the hours and hours I spent in and out of colleges.
At S.I.U. I had a roommate from New York whose name was Carol. It wasn’t that he was gay or trans or anything. It was 1968 and he was just weird. Those days you had to be significantly weird to stand out from the rest of us who were doing our best to, well-be weird.
Carol taught me that if you suck all the air out of the loaf of bread you just bought, twist and tie it tightly, it will taste like day one for most of the week.
He was right. Thank God college wasn’t a waste altogether!
