52 Loaves by William Alexander Read Free Book Online Page A

particular morning, as I watched the poolish gently bubble while upstairs everyone else slept, I couldn’t escape the fact that, having given up searching for God, I had started searching for perfection on earth. I wasn’t merely baking bread; I was on a pilgrimage for heavenly bread. What’s more, I was seeking perfection in the food most associated with Christianity.
    The symbol of Christ’s body. The staff of life. Why had I chosen bread? I didn’t know the answer, but suddenly I was troubled by the question. Might this quest be about more than crust and crumb after all? And if so, why should that be upsetting? There must be something else going on, I told myself, and just like that, this Sunday morning deflated on me like so many of my loaves, crushing me underneath a great sadness, a grief, a longing I hadn’t felt in many years.
    What was I trying to connect to with this ritual, this almost spiritual quest for perfection? Or should the question be, not what, but who ? No, no, no; the notion seemed absurd, too pat, and way, way too Freudian. I wanted badly to dismiss it, but I was shaking now, overcome with loss. As I sat over my bowl of pool-ish, full of life, life that would be extinguished within hours for the benefit of my family, I inhaled deeply, filling my lungs with its yeasty aroma. I ached for the release of tears, but all I could coax from my hardened, nonbelieving soul was a single teardrop, which I let fall, unceremoniously, into my bread.

WEEK
8
“The Rest of the World Will Be Dead”
    Ownership of a good milch cow is a valuable means of . . . preventing pellagra, and should be encouraged to the utmost.
—Dr. Joseph Goldberger
    “You want me to fly to South Carolina to talk to a book club? Come on, Michael, I’m trying to bake bread here.” Not to mention hang on to my day job, from which I’d have to take two days off for this event. I had never turned down a request from my publicist, but this one seemed a little unreasonable (nearly as unreasonable as my excuse).
    Until he explained that it wasn’t just a book club. It was all of the book clubs in the Charleston area, some seven hundred readers, and the event was their annual luncheon, the literary/social event of the year. They needed a last-minute replacement for Khaled Hosseini, whose novel The Kite Runner had earned more than the gross national product of his native Afghanistan and was about to be released as a movie. Talk about a drop in marquee value!
    “No one will even know who I am,” I protested. *
    “They will when you’re done.” Spoken like a true publicist.
    Which is how I found myself, seminauseous with stage fright, sitting at a long table with three best-selling authors, all of whom had shared the experience of looking down from the lofty perch of the top—the very top, number one—of the New York Times best-seller list. How to open this fift een-minute talk had been weighing on me for the entire week. I’d arrived in Charleston the day before and spent hours walking around the beautiful city, admiring its architecture, its gardens and old churches, and its waterfront but not enjoying any of it, owing both to nerves and to the fact that I didn’t have an opening for my talk. As for the gardens, I’d never seen private gardens like these. Everyone in this city was a gardener, and a damned good one at that. What could I (an interloper from New York, no less) tell this southern audience about gardening?
    Although my public speaking to date had been limited to places like Florida, New York (which is a town, not a typographical error), in front of barely enough people to field a baseball team, I had learned the importance of grabbing the audience in the first thirty seconds, or you’re toast.
    The problem was, I didn’t want to talk about growing tomatoes; my mind was occupied with something else entirely. And it had to do with a slip of paper I had tucked away and recently found in my desk. A single word was