Bread

I go to the grocery store every morning. I could, I guess, go once a week or maybe twice like most people do but I like stopping in after I attend the morning fellowship meeting I usually go to. Anyway, it seems as if we’re always in need of something: milk and diet soda and coffee-cream are almost always on the list along with the diet food my wife eats with amazing consistency.

When I was a boy, growing up on Chicago’s south side, my mother often sent me to a bakery for a loaf of fresh bread. I’d run the two blocks from the apartment building my parents owned to 79th Street and turn west to run along the street in front of Our Lady of Peace Church and then cross Jeffrey Boulevard to the bakery.

There was a newsstand on that corner, 79th and Jeffrey, where a short, dark, old man sold the Tribune and, I guess, magazines and cigarettes. In those days, if you were in a car and wanted the newspaper, all you had to do was stop, roll your window down, and honk. Joe, I think that was his name, would fold a paper in half (unless it was Sunday, when the paper was too thick) and run to the car to deliver it, all for a nickel.

I don’t recall the name of the bakery, though I do know it was run by an elderly couple. It seems like all neighborhood stores then were operated by gray-haired husbands and wives who, for some reason, hardly ever spoke to each other. The bakery couple was no exception. They didn’t speak to each other, but they knew every customer by name, even the customer’s children, like me.

It’s funny, I don’t remember the name of the bakery, but I do remember the husband who worked behind the counter seemed always to have flour on his hands. "How can we help you?" he’d ask. I’d tell him I wanted a loaf of white, thin sliced, or of pumpernickel, thin sliced, and he’d slap his hands together and laugh as if I’d just told him the best joke he’d ever heard. "You got it," he’d say. "You got it." And then he’d put a loaf of bread in automatic slicer that fascinated and frightened me.

He knew, somehow, that I loved to eat the end slices from the loaf of still-warm bread as I walked home. He never handed them to me, though. He’d take them, a slice from each end, and wrap them together in paper and hand them to me without a word. Maybe he did that for all the boys who ran errands for their mothers. Girls, too, I guess, though almost every family in our neighborhood had at least one boy big enough to send to the bakery.

The grocery store I go to these days is big and modern. It sells lottery tickets, outdoor furniture, cosmetics, greeting cards, Miami Dolphin tee-shirts, appliances, and other inedibles as well as food and drink. I’m there so often that the women and men who work the front registers know me on sight and always ask how I’m doing. The manager calls me by name.

That’s nice. But what’s really nice is the huge bakery in the back of the store. I stop there almost every day for a loaf of thin-sliced pumpernickel or something called White Mountain Bread. There’s a baker behind the counter, a middle-aged woman named Judy, who always says hello. She knows I like bread thin sliced and knows I like bread warm. She can’t always give me warm bread. I understand that. But when there’s fresh break cooling on racks in the back of the huge bakery she grabs one for me and puts it in a slicer that looks and sounds exactly like the one from Chicago almost sixty years ago.

I asked, once, for the end slices from a loaf of pumpernickel she was slicing and she handed them to me with a smile. I like that. Now she always gives me the end slices of any warm loaf she slices for me.

Isn't that something?