It’s May underway here and berries and cherries are ripening in the central valley. I threw those June subscriptions in the shop for you if you like to plan ahead and jump in there, you can go right ahead and scroll down to that shop button.
In bakery news, I currently have a fella named Joe rummaging around in the innards of my fridge to try to make it cold again. Last week I woke up on Thursday and the trusty metal box was sitting at a toasty warm 66 degrees (that’s not right!) and murdered a bunch of product (ouch). I definitely had a stressful and sweaty day trying salvage my hard work from circumstances outside my control.
After 11 years coping with the unpredictable ebb and flow that is a foodservice life, I guess I’ve developed a kind of wry “I’ll take what I can get” attitude. Although there’s always the initial sting that makes me want to cry like a little kid over a dropped ice cream cone for a second, I ultimately stood tall in my big girl boots, remade a ton of dough, sweated it out, and finished the day with commiseration and a beer over at Penny University. Good enough for me, and thank goodness for my friends.
Currently I’m reading The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck which is one of his more under appreciated novels. It’s sort of an anthology of vignettes of all the people who intersect with each other at a bus stop in the valley halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. It’s kind of a perfect choice for me right now, who has been absolutely preoccupied in mind by public transportation. I never made it out of the valley to a big city, the best I could do was move to downtown Modesto where really old houses are cheap and my neighbors are a transmission shop, and electrical substation and a cremation service. For me, walkability was my main goal.
My oldest is turning 18 this year and spent most of her life walking and biking everywhere with me, and she has no desire to drive a car. Totally reasonable! A car is very expensive and can be dangerous. I showed her how to use her MJC student ID to ride the bus for free, and find routes going where she wants to go. Sophie got a job at the theatre, an easy walking distance from our house. I’ve been taking her on excursions on the BART around the bay area to show her how to get to concert venues, art museums, iconic book stores, and historic theatres.
I notice how commonly other adults ask my kid about driving. I don’t typically think of myself as someone who is particularly against the grain, until I talk to people who find my lack of concern with the teen driving rite of passage strange. I keep thinking back to when Sophie was 12 and we got to go to Paris together. As a lovers of baked goods and art, we were in heaven on earth there. Louvre and boulangerie not withstanding, I couldn’t stop remarking when I came back that my favourite thing in Paris wasn’t the mille-fueille, it was the Metro Stations. This May Day I want bread and roses, but also, beautiful public transit.