The Way It Was

How fussy I am. Ask anyone. I like something done the way I like it, this way and not any other way. It is very hard for me to keep my hands off.

It makes me sad to think of my mother who let others raise me and who could not have had much say, if any. She simply wasn’t there. What could she have insisted on, and how would she have known how well her instructions were carried out, or if they were at all?

My mother had to keep her hands off. As an example, my mother never made Campbell’s Tomato Soup in her life, yet that is what I remember Margaret giving us for supper night after night, tomato soup with white Wonder Bread and butter. A white Wonder Bread delivery truck painted with colored circles used to deliver bread house to house.

No truck delivered the heavy loaves of bread my mother bought fresh from the Jewish bakery in the North End. None of it was pre-sliced. No one would have wanted it to be. Like a professional, my mother cut the thick slices of the hearty rye or pumpernickel. This bread was the original staff of life, much like the loaves that had been thrown on the kitchen table in my father’s home in Russia.

Even in terms of food, I lived in two worlds.

And now, from my childhood contrast of breads, I'll take a minute to tell you about my daughter and the contradiction she experienced.

Every Saturday morning, beginning when my daughter started first grade in Springfield, Massachusetts, I would bake three loaves of a delicious healthy whole wheat bread. I made sure it was healthy. I added brewer’s yeast and bone meal powder and God knows what else.

After teaching school all week, making the bread was therapy for me. I loved kneading the dough. Slap slap on the cutting board, push, pull, turn it over, sprinkle a little flour, cover the bread dough with a towel, let it sit, knead again, three different times. Then drip oil onto the sides and bottom of the bread pans, sprinkle flour with my fingers on top of the oil, drop in the dough, and slide the bread pans into the hot oven with such a sense of satisfaction. Then, while I cleaned house or whatever else I did in the house while the bread was baking, it was as if I listened to the smell of bread baking.

I loved taking the lightly-browned loaves from the oven. Then, not even letting the bread cool, I would saw thick wobbly slices, slap sweet butter onto the thick uneven slices and bite into the bread, now dripping with melting butter.

Truly, my daughter loved this bread as much as I did. Only, she was ashamed to take the sandwiches made with it to school for lunch. She would tell me, “I want plain white Wonder bread like all the other kids. I just want to be a regular girl."

But that was not in the cards for her any more than it had been for me.