I Wish I'd Never Ever Seen Your Face
I've been back to baking my grandmother's bread. She's baked it as long as I remember and there is absolutely no telling how old that starter she split off for me the day after Thanksgiving really is. She typed the recipe onto several sheets of paper with a typewriter around 1994. I remember that. I remember the typewriter. The edges of the half page with her recipe still have carbon traces across the paper. I framed it up in pale yellow with a Wedgewood blue mat. It's that precious to me. It sits on my bookshelf with the photographs I most prize, my father's graduation photo, my mother with her guitar, baby me on Daddy's lap, Gabe one Christmas Eve at the park in his little blue sweater and smiling cheeks, a photo I took of my best friend that he says is the best one ever taken, Gabe looking up at me, around five or so, his pale blue eyes as earnest as they have remained.
There are so many memories wrapped up in all my senses with this bread. My entire childhood. That last Christmas with Daddy. Saturday mornings and clothes drying out on the line and the scent of the breeze through the open window in the cool of the day. Every celebration I remember for my whole life contains the smell of that bread rising and baking, the sound of the crust cracking under a serrated blade, the melted butter dripping out of the holes and down my hand, the cushion crush as you bit into a warm slice and the comfort and safety that came with all of those things. I hope to bring those back to my house now. Those feelings and all the innocence of youth and inexperience.
I should have fed it, discarded a batch, fed it again. All of my instincts told me that it was a little too deflated to make what I know that bread can be: light, beautiful crumb, tall, and golden. But I doubted my instincts an ignored all the signs, all the red flags that told me this was not the way. I trusted what someone else said instead of trusting what I felt. What I knew. What my eyes saw and my own hands felt. That inner voice protested when I saw that the starter hadn't really bubbled as I expected; it gets this sort of head, usually more than an inch thick on top and this batch lacked it. I knew when I saw the result of the first proof that it was too dense and hadn't risen enough. I knew when I woke up the next morning and looked at the loaves and they still seemed a little small. And when they baked, they didn't get brown like I expected. The only other time that has ever happened to me, it was because I forgot to add the baking powder to my batch of biscuits.
And sure enough, that bread was a bit dense and flat and pale. It tasted fine, but I have made better batches in my life.
I ignore the things that tell me when something is all wrong for me. I doubt myself. I guess it's because I lived so long in this state of fear and doubt and questioning that I taught myself not to believe when I feel it now. I've been telling myself for some time now that I need to trust me when something tells me to run. When something tells me to wait. When something in me tells me that charging forward will end in disappointment at best and disaster at worst.
This time, I have all the right feelings. Those I struggle so much less with. I know when things are .perfectly right and when they are, I don't have a single doubt. Life is like that for me. This batch is going to rise. Twelve hours from now, there will be cool loaves on the countertop. I'll take one to my lunch date tomorrow and send one home to Candice's Mema. I'll take a couple from the next batch to the office to share with my coworkers. We all survive on baked goods passed around between the best bakers of us. That chocolate cake story is one for the ages.
It's not out of the oven, but I knew when I fed the starter that this one would be perfect. And I felt it again when I mixed the dough, and again after the first proof, punching the puffy, soft ball down and dividing it into three. It felt exactly right the whole time. And in the morning, I'll wake up and turn on the oven and wait thirty minutes before I pull three perfect loaves out.
I kind of feel the same way about that lunch date. No instinct of fear at all. Familiarity, certainly. He reminds me of someone I used to know. Someone I hadn't seen in fifteen years. Things I'd forgotten about them in those fifteen years. I'm going to let myself trust that. And then we'll see, I guess. I'm in no hurry to go jumping from the frying pan to the fire. I need a friend first. I think he's perfectly capable and perfectly willing. And I don't even think it will be challenging for him. Something makes me believe that his kindness is sincere. Here's to the good loaves, the ones we have to wait for. The ones that require patience and trust and faith.
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