Love Letter

November was a difficult month for me. My father died.

He was placed under hospice care at the beginning of the month, and died with exceptional dignity on November 9. That he died with such grace was predictable.

I have spoken about my father often in this blog. He was a baker, just as his father was a baker. While as far as I know, he never said this out loud, I’m not sure being a baker was his first choice. I think if he could have been anything he wanted when he grew up, he would have been a professional musician. Making a living by blowing a horn.

He was, in fact, a musician when he met my mom. He was playing in my mom’s brother’s dance band when he spotted the pretty petite girl who was his band leader’s sister. He set his sights on her, and never looked back.

He knew that after they got married and began a family, a musician’s life was not practical. So he went back to my grandfather’s bakery to work, and eventually bought the bakery from him. He and my mom ran a very successful business, and he was probably the best baker in the entire Midwest.

He fully understood the feel of a dough or the way a cake batter should look. If the look or feel wasn’t right, he knew why and how to fix it. My dad would roll out yeast donut dough, and could cut the donuts and flip them onto his finger (tossing the hole aside) all in one flawless motion – faster than you can say Krispy Kreme.

He was proud of his skill, proud of his business, proud of his family. He taught my brother to be a baker, and taught all of us the importance of hard work and doing our best. After all, we couldn’t produce incomplete homework any more than he could put a shapeless loaf of bread into his showcase. Work hard for the best product.

He taught us all how to live and what is important in life. There was no use in his eyes in looking at what might have been but only in looking ahead and at the gifts he was given. And what was important to him was his family, beautiful music, and good food – and if you could have all three together, that was even better.

He died peacefully, sitting in his easy chair in his own living room. Fittingly, his three daughters had just taken a bit of time away from him to have a sandwich, and once we sat down next to him again, he took his last breath. It would have been important to him that we would have eaten something before he left us. In fact, I’m pretty sure my mom and my grandmother were in heaven telling him, “Now Honey, there’s no need for you to go anywhere until they have had a little something to eat.”

While my brother is a professional baker, I only dabble. I’m fairly successful, but fully admit that nothing about baking is intuitive to me. I follow a recipe and my baked goods generally turn out to be pretty tasty. But when my bread won’t rise or my cakes fall in the middle, I can’t tell you if there is too much humidity or the flour is old or the water used to proof the yeast was too hot or too cold. But in my dad’s memory, I will continue to bake. And also in his memory, I will try to always have a positive outlook, just as he did.

And finally, I pledge to learn to make a decent loaf of bread. But it won’t be as good as his.