Daily Bread

One of the most prized pieces on my over inflated bridal registry was a Cuisinart breadmaker. It oozed urban homesteader with the brushed chrome and ability to churn out whole grain goodness hands free in a Sunday afternoon. Upon registering for it the husband even got in on the excitement citing a morning ritual of coffee and warm homemade bread to begin our days of married bliss. Not to mention Barbara Kingsolver’s husband wrote an inset in his wife’s book about how to impress your wife with a breadmaker. When we opened the box our first Christmas from my mom, we felt we were so on the pulse of married trendiness we could hardly stand it.

We put the breadmaker to use probably more than the average person uses a small appliance with such limited output. Our Sundays were in fact filled with good bread, pizza dough, angel biscuits, and banana bread. We grew dill our first year of marriage and the husband churned out dill bread until Thanksgiving. When the economy started to fall apart and we were both faced with potential layoffs and the husband made the voluntary cut back to go back to school, the breadmaker took the place of store bought bread because we could always scrap together whatever kind of flour was left in the pantry to produce a small loaf for the week. The breadmaker fueled our creative survival as it could receive the most mundane ingredients stacking liquids under solids topped off with yeast to produce fluffy white decadence and make us feel like rich gourmets even if all we had to go with it was peanut butter or hummus from the back of the fridge.

When I was pregnant I made bread with rye or flax seed meal to fulfill my whole grain needs. Sometimes my shifting appetite would outlive the loaf which was left to mold in wrapped cellophane and the breadmaker parts would acquire layers of gunk while they sat in the sink waiting for the husband to wash them in between classes and all nighters. Little did we know our negligence of the breadmaker was the foreshadowing the relinquishment of sane living that comes with having a baby.

Today we have a one month old child and the breadmaker sits in a prominently displayed location in the dining room, set up by my mom who saw it necessary to spend the time I was in the hospital cleaning and organizing my house, beginning with washing our breadmaker and removing it from the very uncool location of on top of the dryer. While mom was swiffering and scrubbing our house the husband and I were drowning in a river of sleep deprivation. I was recovering from major surgery and learning to breast feed my son without falling asleep while the husband learned to change baby while figuring out how to balance his next week and a half of missed classes and freelance deadlines. Neither of us had a clue what we were getting into and had both assumed I would naturally push out an intuitive little soul who would sleep and feed naturally and life would snap back to normal in a matter of weeks. On money we would say “how much does an infant need in the first months anyway?” On childcare “the students at my school bring their dogs to class, I can certainly bring my baby” or “I’ll just set up a pack n play in my office, all he’ll do is eat and sleep those first months anyway .”

All this seemed life faraway fantasies concocted by very naïve people on the first day of my son’s life as as I, on my knees peeked out of the hospital bathroom at my husband soothing the baby in the rocking chair after his most recent crying spell. I had forgotten that the epidural was still flowing through my body and the painkillers from the C-Section had masked my lack of strength so much that the simple misstep of one foot had sent me to the ground. I pulled the emergency cord and the husband looked at me with total baby versus spouse conflict. I told him I was fine but when hospital staff didn’t come quick enough the baby returned to the cradle and he hoisted me back to my bed. Later that day as he e-mailed his freelance clients on the delay in getting his work done (and the delay of us then getting paid) the WIC woman stopped by to inform me that I qualified for vouchers for weekly food items for myself and the baby. As a nursing mom, I qualified for the “whole grain option”, meaning a weekly loaf of whole grain bread from any local large chain grocery store. I signed my name with relief on the government paperwork as my son rested on my chest in between feeding.

It may be months (even years) before my life evens out to one of homemade whole grain bread again. In the meantime I reach for the pre-sliced Sara Lee whole wheat without even bothering to toast it. These days, I can’t even keep night from day. But when it does, the breadmaker is still standing like a beacon of social savviness reminding or taunting us that we were once adults who sought a life of leisure in the form of warm simple carbs. I brush the crumbs of my Sara Lee slice off of my son who perpetually sleeps on my chest now and try to type over his tiny limp body to draw myself back into the world that was once myself. I hope to do it all again tomorrow.

Albuquerque, 5:57 AM

It’s at this time
I think of you the most
As I wait impatiently
For my ride
Always a little late

It was at this time
I’d hear
Your razor splash in the sink
Tap the porcelain edge
To wake me for school

It was at this time
I’d hear
Old newspaper crumple
Into the rusted wood stove
The clank of logs
Onto the chilled floor

And your voice
Cut through the thin walls
Asking
“Who wants grits and eggs?”

I never did

I start to call from the curb
To see if you are up
But know you have been
For hours now
Behind the motor of the carriage mill

Logs run over the blade
Send woodchips in every direction
And you
Safe behind the Plexiglas
Dry knuckles on the gears
Face West

Motionless

Headlights pull up
I look once more
As the light
Slices over the Sandias
And I think of you
Safe on the other side
Of a complicated world
I choose to battle everyday

I jump into the warmed seat
And begin to wind my path
Through desert mesas
And locked cell doors

Like water over time
Chisels away stone
Carving my life
Out of a sunrise, morning red

Eve

There was nothing soft about the café where Cyndi and I met. The floor was industrial linoleum that we swept and mopped every night at closing and the kitchen red clay tile with grout stained black. The décor was all steel and rusted metal- homage to found objects of the rural south but a rough reminder that even when you run your hands through smooth wet grass in Alabama you are liable to get tangled on a rusty stake from a plow or railroad tie. Eve was the only thing that fluttered through the concrete counters and stainless steel with lightness and grace. She wore white linen everyday back then and her black hair down to her shoulders flowed behind leaving a barrier between her and the world of college students bent over chicken croissants and veggie pitas. I rarely spoke to her then because she seemed too much of an enigma. Sometimes I would look at her and wonder if she were real or some ghost that haunted the space below the stairs and was simply looking at me through some ectoblastic haze. Cyndi and I opened the café in the mornings with Cisco coffee and big pots of boiling water for the sweet tea. I could never get the vegetables cut quick enough before the lunch line was out the door and I was standing over a griddle making a reuben by 11:30 AM. We would go non-stop until 3 pm, dead on our feet with one guy running the dishwasher in the kitchen until the entire back room was like a steam sauna. Cyndi became my best friend and was in my wedding. She just flew down from Colorado to throw me a baby shower this weekend and see me pregnant for the first time. Eve started wearing brown in 1998 around the same time I moved back to Alabama. I’ve never seen her wear white again. Instead of gliding through a room she would waddle with a dark hat on her head and the smile of a witch who knew the spell that would put you down for good. She came to the shower wearing red and is now a therapist. We all stuffed out faces on chicken and veggie pitas that someone else made and propped our feet up at the end of the day laughing at the intertwining of our lives at Behind the Glass.

Road Trip

It was the peak of hay season. The boys had gotten used to the routine of solitude by now. The rest of the family had gone crazy in the divorce. Their mama was living in Atlanta, Daddy was wearing Reeboks and spending all of his time in Panama City with his new wife, and their sister was living in a town neither could pronounce somewhere in California. The family land that had been so vehemently fought over in court sat idle and neglected. They had cut and mowed all week fixing the tractor in between with pliers and sparking wires between black grease creased hands. The evenings began with cans of Miller Light and usually ended with one rebuilt truck digging another out of the middle of a muddy creek with a come along. It was around dusk when the idea was first mentioned, but not until after 9:30 and several Millers that they backed the least ragged out truck up to the farm gas pump. The boys filled every milk jug and plastic container they could scrounge and laid them neatly in the bed of the truck. They were no stranger to siphoning gas from the state trucks parked on the side of the road but neither had ever been west of Selma so there was no way to count on this practice to sustain the trip all the way to California. The house their parents built sat dark and unshaken as they cleaned out the cabinets of canned goods grabbing a handful of dirty clothes to stuff behind the seat. On the back of an unopened insurance bill they wrote “Dear Daddy, We’ve gone to California.”

In the summer 1995, I was living in Central California in a studio duplex with a view of the drug park across the street and a 300 lb neighbor named Rudy; who instructed in no uncertain terms upon moving in to not call the cable company because he had rigged the duplex so we all got it for free. I was standing in front of the swamp cooler at the end of the day trying to dry the sweat in my hair before a blind date at the Red Robin with a rock climber when the phone rang. The familiar shrill of my Granny’s voice blasted into my ear “Do you know your brothers are coming to see you in California?”

At this point it had been 24 hours since their departure. Apparently they had called from Dallas to confirm that it was true. I knew immediately why. They saw Dallas as a safe distance from the family, their first step out of the true south. No sheriff could pull them over past this point and if the truck broke down they were really on their own. But what I was really thinking about was what my two brothers must be feeling and how I wished I could see them driving through the western states right now. This was long before cel phones were part of our reality and from the family’s perspective, the only reference point anyone had was the time it had taken me to drive out a few months earlier. We were all calculating where they might be based on my solitary haul west. I could barely sleep that night. My dad’s family was furious and convinced I had put them up to it, possibly even sending them money. My dad’s brother called my mom’s sister, a line of communication that had not been crossed since the divorce to try to gather information on who exactly knew what and when. It turned out we were all in the same boat for a change.

I hardly slept the night I heard my brothers were driving to California. There had been no word for over 24 hours as to where they were but the thought that they were headed my way was like believing in Santa Clause on Christmas Eve. The center of our family was shifting west for the first time ever. How long would they stay? Were they planning to move in with me? Would the three of us set up house and have the family neither of our parents had been able to hold together? I fantasized into the early morning until the phone rang a little before 7 AM. It was the 15 year old. He was calling from Barstow to ask exactly what the name of the town in California was and which direction they should go from there. I frantically gave him directions and then asked “What do you think of California so far?” I had decided to take them camping while they were here. “So far it stinks” he quipped back “I mean literally, it’s smelled like rotten eggs ever since we crossed the state line.”

A few hours later the three of us crammed into a Denny’s booth over 5 blue plate specials when the boys deduced the rotten egg smell had really been the battery dying on the truck. They had driven in the night with flashlights shined out the window somewhere in Oklahoma when they realized the battery wouldn’t make it. The truck arrived in a state in which it had to be pushed off in order to crank which included a nice backfire in case the spectacle of 2 boys hollering “punch it” to one another didn’t grab enough attention from onlookers.