It’s a Tuesday and it’s back to school here! Carbs are extremely beneficial to developing brains, did you know this? Well here I am with some pro- carbohydrate propaganda. Our brains work beautifully with grainy toasts for breakfasts and hearty sandwiches for lunch! Bread on the side with dinners, bread underneath beautiful ripe tomatoes with some mozzarella and basil plucked from a little pot in the garden. The staff of life, our daily bread, that quotidian pleasure worth rhapsodizing about and riffing on with whimsy and zeal. Join the pro-toast anti-corporate cereal resistance!
Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing...
Hey everyone,
I’m out of office this week for our yearly end of July vacation celebrating my (40th) and my son’s (14th) birthdays. No bread this week on Thursday, but we’ll be back at it next week with the August Bread and, apparently, a new school year.
I’m going to simply leave you with a favorite poem here where I typically write my prose. Chew on that a little if you don’t mind and I’ll catch up with you next week when I’m back behind the baker’s bench.
-B.
Dogfish
by Mary Oliver
Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman's boot,
with a white belly.
If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile
under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,
which was rough
as a thousand sharpened nails.
And you know
what a smile means,
don't you?
*
I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
whoever I was, I was
alive
for a little while.
*
It was evening, and no longer summer.
Three small fish, I don't know what they were,
huddled in the highest ripples
as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body
one gesture, one black sleeve
that could fit easily around
the bodies of three small fish.
*
Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don't we?
Slowly
*
the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.
*
You don't want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don't want to tell it, I want to listen
to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.
And anyway it's the same old story - - -
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.
Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.
And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.
*
And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.
*
And probably,
if they don't waste time
looking for an easier world,
they can do it.
Life on earth as we know it...
It’s another Tuesday night. I’ve made a decent amount of bread today, there’s a dried dough bit stuck somewhere behind my elbow as usual and a weird twinge in my back under a shoulder blade. It’s been a over a decade of using my human form as a piece of bakery equipment and the wear and tear is deeply felt. Hours standing, hefting a peel holding 15 pounds of loaves in and out of 6 shelves of hot oven, making repetitive shapes with hands and fingers, carrying 50 pound bags of flour and grain, lifting tubs full of kilos and kilos of dough. Cutting, folding, shaping, placing on boards and lifting boards of kilo sized dough balls into a rack configuring 64 loaves at a time, moving in a little circle around a room while watching the light change through the windows. Morning folk tunes feather into afternoon Motown and then slip into evening jazz. Hands move through soap bubble dishwater, sweeping motions, and knife-work for meals in between. A life lived in a never ending flow dance of handwork to a background melody.
I occasional marvel at what a human can do, spurred on only by an engine of hope perhaps and cyclical dreaming. What I know in my body, a computer can never truly understand. When I stand in the middle of the bakery I can feel the atmospheric pressure, a coming storm or cloud in my very bones. When I place my hand under the tap, my years of experience tells me what temperature it is, I can visually assess that a dough needs more water, that the flour is not milled quite as fine, that fermentation is skipping along quickly, or that a thousand other minor sensory inputs vary by slightest degrees. I can even generate my own electricity. I feed myself an omelet, bowl of oats or piece of toast, and turn it into the labor that creates so much more food. I don’t even pollute the earth very much, turning a cup of tea into a bit of sweat equity. For about $2 of breakfast, I can get a lot of work out of me. I can even generate new thoughts and ideas while I scrub dishes and whistle. How special a machine must be to do all of that. Somewhere between strength and tenderness there is a middle road for how to handle a dough and shape a loaf, and a way to make a life outside of the machinery of greed. In between there is time to joke around with a child, listen to a dream, read a poem.
I have seen the factories that make most modern bread, dough mixed, cut, shaped, balled and baked by machines, slipped into plastic, packed onto trucks and driven so many miles. The amount of electricity, exploitation, cheap commodity additives, plastics, and carbon emissions it takes to get you this staple food are enormous. Is this preferable to a human in your neighborhood (in my dreams, in every neighborhood) making a simple 200-400 loaves a week and handing them over warm wrapped in compostable paper? No machine yet can turn two eggs and a slice of toast into the manifestation of maternal love, community spirit, and simple human contentment.
Just as factory farming and factory food has been disastrous for health and humanity, the factory farming of data is the next great idea to replace human work, ingenuity, dreaming, and magic with another ecological nightmare.
Don’t eat factory food. Don’t settle for factory farmed art, writing and ideas. Make your own out dreams of a better world out of toast and tea. Thanks for supporting local sourdough bread made the old fashioned way, by a person you know in your town.
-Bonnie
Bread and Roses
We’re reading Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit this month for my birthday book club (if you want to read the previous post about that you can here)
I’ve been listening to the audiobook while I work in the bakery. There’s an extensive section on the Bread and Roses movement for women’s and worker’s rights during the industrialization era. There were so many times in the past when “just the way things are” included child labor, extreme exploitation, exceptionally dangerous jobs, and overwhelming work hours. It’s important to remember that women and men went hungry on strike, died in unsafe working conditions, and wrote, organized, and spoke out to create the world we may take for granted.
I can’t help but think the rights to our own time, attention, voice and free thoughts are at stake even now. Powerful men become billionaires extracting every ounce of focus and scrap of attention from us using algorithms and digital sleight of hand. Now piles of AI tools are being foisted upon us, whether we ask for them or not. They aim to capitalize while eroding our human ability to read with nuance and understanding, to reason, to generate new thoughts, create art. As if making art, or poems, or reading literature to broaden our minds were the exhausting tasks we were just begging to be relieved of. (sarcasm implied) What are we to do against such powerful forces.
Read a book. Ride your bike. Jump in a river. Tell a friend. Make a silly drawing. Go to the library. Go to the cinema. Cook something new. Write about it in your own handwriting. Call someone on the phone. Take a nap with your cat. Lay under the shade of a tree. Perhaps eat a just made baguette while walking down the street.
People fought and died for those 8 hours you have after work, Don’t let tech corporations siphon it back from you. It’s all yours. We need bread, but also roses. Sustenance as well as arts and leisure.
I need you to read...
In Bonnie news, it appears I will be turning 40 at the end of this month. A few friends asked about some sort of party, but I actually don’t particularly like a confluence in my honor. Don’t get me wrong, I do host a lot of get togethers, and I think they serve an important function communally. The purpose, in my view, of so many informal dinner parties, grilled cheese nights, pizza nights, snacky park play dates and open house potluck’s are so that folks can meet each other. A recurring gathering of rotating friends is like sewing over the same seams, making them stronger and more bound up in each other. I love watching people pairing off and connecting while I fire pizzas or grill sandwiches for piles of kids and make sure everyone has a drink, but I often can’t help feeling that a night will pass without me getting to the magic of deeper conversation. It’s an beloved position and I’ll do it everyday of the year, but on my birthday, I want something more.
I spent the day thinking on what I truly value and maybe a bit about who or what I am (excuse my navel-gazing a moment). I think one of my favorite things is a one on one conversation about a book. More than any other piece of media, a book creates an extended shared reality in a different way. Sure the authors words are there, but the space between the writing and the self creates a new place. An opening, a portal, a shared consciousness. Over the languid hours of reading our nervous systems can rest. Our thoughts can meander. Reading for pleasure can be a hard sell in a world of efficiency, but I entreat you, in this mid year moment of oppressive heat, to find time to siesta with a book in a darkened room to the gentle whirr of the ceiling fan.
SO! Here’s my request, if you’re game. As a birthday present to me and you that we can share, will you read a book with me during the month of July? It’s a very informal book club for my birthday month. I’m reading Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit It’s free to listen to on Spotify, or you can request it from Bookish our local bookstore. It’s a book that forays through so many aspects of life and with such a far reaching scope, I think it could appeal to any person who gardens, writes, thinks, works, and is possibly wondering about the value of pleasure, beauty, art and joy in “times like these”.
Will you read this one book with me for the month of July? If so that would be enough. For extra credit, by July 28th will you email me, text me, stop by the bakery during open hours on a Thursday, catch me at Penny University for a coffee, or at Intermission for a drink, and talk to me about all your thoughts about the book we just read? I would love to hear all about it.
I’ll send you off with one of my favorite songs to listen to while you acquire your book or audio book for this community thought experiment….
Think a little about that, and I’ll see you soon.
On one foot...
As some of you may have heard, my lovely girlfriend Jill had (planned and very necessary) foot surgery a week and a half ago. She’s resting up, not putting weight on one of her legs, and catching up on a lot of reading (averaging and impressive 200 pages a day) and watching great films (lately featuring Katharine Hepburn). With six kids between us, I’m grateful to have some flexibility with this job to keep the motor running through times like these. Between working the ovens I can run out to take bowls of yogurt and granola, mugs of tea, and plates of greek salad (paired deliciously with ibuprofen) for her. Administering a well place pillow is about as much nursing expertise I can provide before being called back by my timers to the doughs, the oven decks, and the dish pits. After putting the doughs away, I can drive to appointments, wrangle stir fries and lasagnas, and swim and play with all the kids. My cottage bakery has allowed me to care when necessary in all kinds of situations over the past decade, and that has always been the part of my paycheck that is impossible to quantify. There’s definitely dollars missing at times from the budgets, and sometimes they are missing when it counts, and that is admittedly hard. It’s a bargain most women make, and will continue to make when our hearts and the cash registers sit on the scales side by side. I don’t know how to draw any necessary conclusion except that, I would always rather belong to myself, and my labor belong first and foremost to the ones I love most.
Thanks for reading.
Thoughts on small businesses, safety, and running around downtown
Also, our friend Vera Brosgol is visiting the bakery this week to do some sketching and spend some time with us. In case that name sounds familiar, she also happens to be a bestselling children’s book author and illustrator. If you have any young folks who love her books on hand, bring them by on Thursday and I’ll see if she can sign something for you :)
In baker news, as usual, I’ve been thinking, a lot. Almost anyone I know has already heard me ramble at length about the importance of supporting small, local businesses and farmers. Not only is it the morally superior choice, and the community building choice, but as I often express, the dollars you spend at local businesses are more likely to stay in your city’s economy. As soon as that dollar ends up at a wal-mart, amazon, or starbucks, it’s gone from us forever. It will never be spent at the modesto farmers market by your local barista, or invested in a local wheat farm by your bread baker. Those dollars go straight into the oligarchy, and unfortunately more and more, those dollars evade paying their fair share of taxes, and try to fund elections for politicians that peel our civil rights away from us. I know my strawberry farmer, local cafe, bookshop, and bakery would never do something like that with my transitory twenty dollars. This, is something we easily acknowledge and understand.
The other thing about small businesses that isn’t mentioned enough, is how they make communities safer. I was thinking about this as I walk around downtown often, and have wandered around with my kids so much for the last ten years, that even they are recognized as regulars. When people ask me if I feel safe as my teenager has enjoyed the freedom of wandering our neighborhood. Sure, on H street they know her at the Pho restaurant that makes us soup when we are sick, and at Lucille’s where I send her to pick up a quick iced coffee for mom. On 13th street the Mo Pride center volunteers provide care and needed social time for modesto lgbtq youth. They know us at the Churchkey bar, where we’ve split a few years worth of monthly burgers and a shirley temple. The librarians know us, and the farmers market vendors, especially Patty who let her help sell strawberries when she was 10 years old, and Stephanie who remembers that she loves molasses crinkle cookies. At Penny and Preservation coffee, everyone knows that she likes an iced mocha, at the bead shop Holly has made bracelets with Sophie since she was 5 years old. The State Theatre where she works, Intermission where we drop off focaccia and play cards over drinks and popcorn. The boba shop where they know our order. The Queen Bean where Sam and Ruhi have watched Sophie grow up and she can read poems at open mic night. At Bookish ahse can go to chess club and Most Poetry Small businesses are not just “community” in the sense of a place to gather and bump into our friends, but a watchful angels eye over the youth in our community.
Our kids need safe spaces to be, and the independence to enjoy them. Being a regular at small businesses with my kid has meant more than I thought it would, it’s meant creating a tiny world full of safe, friendly and kind people that watch over them as they meet friends for thai tea, drink coffee while studying, express themselves creatively, enjoy the arts, borrow books and grab snacks at the market. Maybe I live in a bubble, but it’s a very nice utopia inside of here. I sure hope you join us in this fairy tale village that is, magical downtown Modesto. Let’s protect our precious community by giving it everything we’ve got.
What are you reading, eating, cooking, walking, listening to and watching? Reply to this email and let me know if you like! Otherwise we can talk all about it on any given Thursday. All the best -Bonnie
Like a cat in a hammock, so go the days of our lives...
Hi neighbors and far flung old friends,July subscriptions just floated into the shop, feel free to grab one early if you like to. If not, don’t worry, you can still visit us for extras and take your chances!
We’re sailing into June and despite the painful heat, I do still love being a bread baker. I realize now after many years that I need a shirt change and an ice cold shower as soon as the ovens are off, an afternoon cucumber lime aguas fresca, and perhaps a stiff drink in the evening to get me through it. Luckily for me, this dusty town provides for me, while I’m centrally located in the mecca of taco and food trucks just waiting to push out the window a monstrous plastic cup filled with all the cooling cucumber lime nectar I could want, and a 5 block evening walk down to intermission to deliver focaccia and for the best old fashioned in town and all the salty buttered popcorn I can eat, until my oldest kiddo gets off work at the theater and decides it’s time for a starlit walk back to the taco trucks for a spicy late night dinner.
Should anyone live so hedonistically with the crumpled dollar bills from selling baguettes pulled straight from the fires of Modesto’s mount doom? I can’t say, but I’d love to kick off my boots and lay down my aching back at night thinking I earned it all (and hopefully enough more to defeat my own hulking monster, the gorgon that is our summertime power bill).
But summer is for hedonism, after all. The days stretch so long, that after I’ve scrubbed dough off my arms and all the bakery dishes, the hammock under the sycamore calls me for at 3:30 p.m. reading session, munching through a nectarine. I listen to the leaves rustle in the breeze, I watch the cloudless sky as two red tailed hawks circle lightly and then plunge down into dry creek beyond, my cat crouton leaps onboard and purrs happily on my chest, rubbing her whiskers against my estate sale dollar Steinbeck paperback. 5 chapters turns into an “accidental” nap, drifting in the drowsy thoughts of imagined worlds and stories. I’m currently reading “To a God Unknown”. Steinbeck’s mystical 1933 parable about settling in the fertile valleys of California.