Letting it rise
BY ANNE LAMOTT

My friend Barbie gave me a bread machine last week. I did not really want it, although I have always loved bread -- the taste of bread, the smell, the images. Unleavened Passover loaves, in memory of Hebrews who had to leave Egypt so fast that they didn't have time to let the bread rise. Communion bread, broken to you; as Jesus was broken that one might live, and in the sharing of brokenness comes oneness, and in that oneness, freedom.

I met Barbie when I was three years sober. She was about my age and also sober, with long, straight hair and round, brown eyes. She had early-stage multiple sclerosis. We got to be friends and she gave me fresh-baked bread from time to time. These loaves made the greatest toast; toast is the loaf's second soul: lighter, a little rough, perhaps more masculine but still comforting, like a soft beard. There is no food I love more than toast.

To come upon a friend making bread, the scent of yeasty dough baking, can send me backward into a wavy Möbius strip of memory, looping back into the kitchen of our house where my mother made bread -- white bread, black bread, Danish pastry. She kneaded her dough like a brawny masseuse, wiping at her damp, furrowed brow with the back of her sleeve, letting it rise, punching it down -- Take that! And thus wafting through the Harold Pinter dialogue and tension of my youth were comforting smells from a world of gingham aprons.

Over the years I watched Barbie's MS progress. She began to need metal crutches sometimes, but she was still driving around in an old, orange VW bug that was always filled with dogs, and she was almost always in a good mood. I do not normally like this in a person, because I do not trust it. She had some huge losses besides the MS -- her boyfriend had cancer, her brother whom she adored had died in a plane crash -- but she was still usually counting her blessings, out loud. She felt that complaining was an insult to God: Here she was, alive, sober, still able to drive, with three or four dogs, several cats, half a dozen birds, friends, a loving God.

Too much gratitude usually drives me a little crazy. I secretly believe that people who talk about their blessings are usually extremely angry, and rather than call out a cheery greeting when they pass you in your garden, they'd really like to lob a bomb at you. But I didn't mind it with Barbie, because she is the real thing, and she had what I wanted: gratitude, and thus, joy. Also, that great white bread.

Over time her MS took away a bit of strength here, coordination and control there. Soon she was always on metal crutches. Then the crutches gave way to a walker, and then all of a sudden you didn't see her around anymore.

So I started going to her house. She was still usually cheerful, tooling around in a wheelchair with all those dogs and cats and birds. There were five bread machines going in different rooms of the house. She didn't just bake for me. As she put it once, maybe God has absconded with her brother, but then he or she had given her a fire department. The firefighters at the local fire station, who were all men, had responded at various times when she had fallen from her wheelchair and needed help getting up. Then, as she became sicker, they fell into the habit of stopping by to check on her often. "Now I have a whole lot of brothers," she says. So she bakes them bread.

Here's my theory: Barbie's body is so limited and uncomfortable in this world, but by baking she is able to present these men and their big appetites with an ideal body of bread, soft and warm. She is saying, "This is the best I can do. I measured it, paid attention, it's warm and it will fuel your great work. And when you eat it, think of me."

That's what it's like to eat Barbie's bread. But horribly, last week when I went to see her, she didn't just give me a loaf of her wonderful bread. She gave me a bread machine. Like I said, I did not really want this thing. I decided to try it out, though, partly because I knew it would make her happy. I measured out all the ingredients, closed the lid, plugged it in, turned it on. Then I stretched out on the couch with a book while my bread baked.

Almost immediately I heard loud ticking from the kitchen, and went to investigate. TICKTICKTICK. I reached my hand down through all the guck to the blade, and tightened it. I growled. Ten minutes in, and already a nightmare.

I tiptoed away hoping for the best, but soon heard TICKTICKTICK -- the bread pan was not pushed down all the way onto the heating coils. I pushed it down, and soon my machine was making a low, bready hum. I lay back down on the couch, pleased with myself.

"Is your bread ready yet?" Sam called from his room.

Minutes later there was a new noise. The bread machine thunked and rumbled, like the washer does when the load is unbalanced. There was a sickening crash.
Sam tore out of his room and together we discovered the bread machine on the floor, dead, lying on its side, the pan nearby, a round blob of dough beside it like a rejected organ. It looked like it had committed suicide.

"Oh, my God!" Sam said, and looked at me with wide-eyed alarm, like, "Boy are you going to get in trouble when mom comes home." Then he remembered that I was mom, and he covered his mouth as if to muffle his scream. My self-loathing blossomed like a time-lapse film of desert flowers.

"What should I do?" I asked.

"Maybe you can still get it to work," he said sensibly. So I put it back on the counter, closed the lid, even though it looked broken, and decided to try again and just see where we stood. I prepared a new batch of ingredients; plugged it in.

Two hours later I had a chef's-hat-shaped loaf of golden-brown bread. You could have put it on the cover of Sunset magazine. I stood gazing with excitement and I thought, "I am going to get to take Barbie some soon!" God ... It's just amazing: You have a pile of flour, some water and sugar and salt and yeast, and then not too long later, you have a cloud that nourishes. Out of what looks like dirt and ash comes the gift of life, wrapped in an aroma as fresh as mountain air. "Oh, God," the mystic Rumi wrote, "turn me into a well-baked loaf."

It turned out to be terrible bread. It was almost entirely lacking in taste, and the texture was perhaps more like sawdust than I'd hoped. Now, weren't you expecting for it to be fluffy and delicious, so we could have another upbeat alchemical story on our hands? Because -- I won't lie -- that was not the case. Until I thought to toast it, and slather it with butter and share it with Sam. And it was so, so good.

First published in salon.com June 1999.
©Anne Lamott. Reprinted by permission.