Baking Bread and John Keats

Baking Bread and John Keats 

I have been baking bread for fifty years yet still, rarely, ‘get-it-right’. That’s not to say I bake every week. Sometimes a month or more will pass with only commercial, or semi-commercial loaves from the local market gracing our table.

I will say, emphatically, the selection and quality of baked goods available today at the market is infinitely better than what the industry convinced us to eat back in the fifties/sixties. I still recall advertisements on many of the television western serials for Langendorf, Weber’s, Bond, and Wonder bread, and who knows how many other related brands urging us to fill up on their tasteless white product in order to become a healthier, smarter etc. young man/woman. Things don’t seem to have changed much, only the product.

I don’t have a mixer with a dough hook to mix my ingredients, (but neither did those early Middle Eastern people 8,000 years ago) but I often use a bread making machine for the initial blending and kneading. Many times, especially if I am consciously mired in some esoteric/philosophical internal discourse, or wondering just how many varieties of tomato seed I should plant, I dispense with the machine entirely, and do it all by hand. I’ve always done a lot of things by hand.

Simple breads are easy, and I don’t understand why more people don’t make their own bread, at least part of the time. With only four or five ingredients what could possibly go wrong? Or be easier? I just baked a loaf of Italian Sandwich Bread from a recipe I found in one of several dozen bread baking books on the shelf and it is, for a simple, basic, white flour bread, delicious, especially toasted.

So what was it I intended to say? I think I wanted to say a few words regarding John Keats, but like wind-dispersed pollen those thoughts have escaped their capsule and are miles away.

Grass Widows and Okra

 The Grass Widows are blooming on the basalt plateaus along the Columbia River. Little shards of fragmented blue sky floating and swirling in snow-melt rivulets. A something to fill any vacant spots in anyones heart. But, standing in awe of the tableau before me I wondered just how necessary, or important, are any of us in this sad, and often desolate world. Humans seem to be the okra in the stew.

Let me explain the ‘okra’ reference.

After my escape from the Air Force in 1964 I shared an apartment (Cedar Crest) in South El Monte with a good friend who had also recently been released from the Air Farce. A party time ensued as we attempted to distance ourselves from, and erase any dark atmospheric aura the military might have stained us with. And we were poor, like most of the other dwellers of the complex.

Well, trying to reduce our daily expenses we took to going around to other apartments (after their assumed dinner time) and asking for any leftover food they might have. Whatever they offered we added to our pot. As a result, every dinner became an unknown surprise, but something we, and many other apartment dwellers looked forward to. We kept the ‘Hobo’ stew happily simmering for several days/weeks(?).

But it all came to an abrupt end one evening. Something was amiss, something in the bubbling pot felt slimy, and was not particularly palatable. It had crawled across our collective tongues and found wanting. Our evolutionary and revolutionary dinner stew was brought to a sudden and final end. Nothing could redeem us.

We examined, analyzed, and finally decided the ‘Trojan Horse’ that had brought down our nightly communal dinners was the okra!

I eat just about everything but still can’t bring myself to eat okra.

The Magic and Promise of Cervantes

 The Magic and Promise of Cervantes, with apologies.

Who among us has not, at one time or another, entertained the dream, the idea, of a life dedicated to overcoming even one of the many injustices inflicted on the human race in this fractured and tortured world? To try, despite uncountable odds, to right even one unbearable wrong? To fight fiercely and fairly for a just and noble cause? To dedicate ones heart and soul and body to the challenge. To… to, but wait, I hear the orchestra tuning their instruments.

But there are other worthy challenges, some within the grasp and capabilities of mortals.

I have spent most of my life in, and with books - blame that, if cause be needed, on my father. (If only every child was so afflicted). And, occasionally, out of the tens of thousand books that have passed through my hands and eyes, the words of some of the authors have resonated with a frequency approaching the hum of gravitational waves rippling through the cosmos. It is the sound of no hand clapping, but of harmony. But the desire to read more of their works, and to know more about their lives and times, is for some of us overwhelming.

Thus are we disposed to accept the challenge.

May I set the stage? I shall become a knight errant and impersonate a lonely man of books. Come, enter into my imagination and see him! His name... Lorenzo Hawkins, a country bibliophile, no longer young ... bony, hollow-faced... eyes that burn with the fire of inner vision. Being retired, he has much time for wine and books. He reads and studies books from morn to night, and often through the night as well. And all he reads excites him, yet oppresses him... fills him with indignation at man's murderous ways toward literature and books. And he conceives the strangest project ever imagined... to become a knight-errant and sally forth into the world and search out all publications extant written by, or in some way connected to the authors of his dreams. No longer shall he be plain Lorenzo Hawkins… but a dauntless book sleuth known as… Lorenzo cercatore di libri.

He will seek out the hidden, the blatant and obscure. Thrift shops, garages, barns. junk stores, abandoned cars, storage units, boats moored at marinas, bedrooms, igloos, foot lockers, yard sales, the tents of the homeless, and anywhere else a book might hide.

Somewhere he feels certain he will find his Dulcinea del Taboso.

Remembering the ‘Teddy Boys’

 Remembering the ‘Teddy Boys’

It was around 1951, and I was a young lad of nine or so living in Stourport-on-Severn in England. I’m not sure, even now, how I ever became aware of the term “Teddy Boys”, or how I understood what the word represented. I do recall that I was told, in some way or other, that they were a group of young people that dressed in rather fancy Edwardian clothes and would beat you up and steal your candy, or take the penny or two your mother might have given you for a ‘lady finger’, without provocation. Avoid them at all costs, I think I was told, even if you might one day become one of them.

One day I decided to go downtown for some reason, perhaps to visit my grandmother’s confectionery, but to get there I would have to run the gauntlet of what I thought were the “Teddy Boys” who hung out at the amusement park. Yes, I do recall passing a few rather specious and intimidating ‘Clockwork Orange’ type young lads leaning against whatever they could find to support themselves, but other than what I considered a definite scowl, I passed unhindered.

What can I say?