Good evening, friends and neighbors.
The last time I wrote a “Snapshots,” I was working the morning bake shift. Since then, I’ve taken over the completely opposite end of the day- evening pastry prep.
I’ve gone from managing the oven and getting the bakery off to a good start each day to watching it slowly empty out, till I shut everything down as the last man left.
If you’re wondering what a bakery looks like as the day dies down, here we go.
Good evenings, friends and neighbors.
You may have noticed, but reality can suck. Quite often, really.
It feels like the world wants something from you every moment. Things go wrong, or they go right in the wrong way, and sometimes you don’t even know what the hell the point of everything IS.
I read somewhere that humans are the only intelligent creatures for whom our own existence poses a problem. Other creatures live in the moment, learning as the go, with the sole aim of “survive another day.” For us, at the pinnacle of the food chain as we are, existential threats to our lives aren’t nearly so frequent. We still have all those frustrating survival mechanisms- transformed into stress, anxiety, depression and all that- but mostly we have the time and leisure to say “Why am I here?”
Reality can be heavy… and fortunately, our intelligence has given us a whole bunch of ways to lighten the load, even for a moment. We came up with movies, video games, all sorts of activities- but it all started with stories.
Photo by Wendy van Zyl on Pexels.com
Good evening, friends and neighbors!
In case you haven’t guessed, I love telling a good story. It’s the way we tend to look at our lives and experiences.
The good guys win (most of the time.) We love stories of redemption, of overcoming adversity, and underdogs. From our earliest mythmakers, we have seen the “plot lines” in our lives.
Of course, those include plots where we aren’t exactly as perfect and noble as we dream of being.
I felt called out here.
Good evening friends and neighbors!
Today’s blog isn’t directly about baking or cooking. It’s not even especially motivational, though you absolutely can- and maybe should consider it so.
Instead, I’m going to tell you a true story- true, because otherwise I might call it a fable- about “the rules.” It’s a story about how I wound up on the business end of them, got out of a tight spot because a sympathetic voice and I decided to bend them, and why knowing when to break the rules can be the best thing you learn in life.
It starts with my 2007 Jeep Cherokee Laredo, and ends with an accident.
Here we go.
Good morning, friends and neighbors.
It’s been more or less the refrain for the last few months.
I walk in to the cafe- usually through the kitchen door, but sometimes through the front. There’s a thin crowd in the morning. Lines of people on their computers against the far wall, where outlets are most plentiful. People in groups take up the central tables- chatting with each other, discussing their plans for the day, trying to cajole their kids into eating one more bite of zucchini muffin. Not too many people are reading books in the cafe in the mornings- readers usually swing in on their lunch breaks, or the late afternoons when most of the crowd is home and it’s a bit quieter. That’s the thing about doing your work in a cafe- it’s somehow more reasonable to be wearing headphones than if you’re just reading a book.
I pass through the employee entrance to the back, knocking sharply on the tinted window- the hand sink and dish pit are right by the door, and I’m likely as not to walk into a perfectly-murder-your-knee-cap-height mixing bowl, or someone just washing up.
Hang up my hoodie, punch the clock- Yes, that’s me. Yes, that’s my shift. Yes, I’m a little early- deal with it, Skynet.
Grab a few necessities out of my backpack then head for my bench.
“Morning, all.”
“Hey, how’re you doing, Matt?”
How am I doing? I’m dead tired. Given a reasonable choice, or a momentary lapse of responsibility or duty, I may not have shown up today. I know exactly what I’m getting in to, and what it’ll be like. I just shrug and flip open my notebook where I’d written down my production for the day yesterday afternoon.
“I’m here.”
Good evening, friends and neighbors.
There are reasons I call myself a “baker,” and not a “pastry chef.”
Beyond the respect and station that I think comes with the “chef” title that I personally don’t think I’ve earned just yet, or the argument that “a chef is a cook who leads other cooks” and I haven’t had any cooks under my command for longer than a couple hours, there’s the fact that… well… I don’t think I’m quite crazy enough yet.
Let me explain- when I say “not crazy enough,” I mean that I still stand in rapt awe, wonder, and a little fear, of people who possess the meticulous attention to detail necessary to do certain things. Not just do them once or twice, but REPETITIVELY, and CONSISTENTLY. No cutting corners, no shrugging things off as “rustic” or “it’s meant to be like that”- if whatever these people do isn’t looking pristine, it’s unacceptable.
While I’m not exactly envious of the perfectionism these individuals have (my grandfather’s saying “Don’t let ‘perfect’ be the enemy of ‘good’” comes to mind- and he was a brain surgeon) I am constantly in wonder of the level of PERCEPTION involved in noticing minuscule details.
Like many things in this world, an ideal case study for it comes from a certain mouse.
