A Non-Rising Confession

A Non-Rising Confession

March 4, 2015

By Jane Tawel

I must confess. My tell-tale heart is beating like a mixer on steroids. I feel really, really terrible. You may never talk to me again and I don’t blame you. Because …….

I killed the friendship bread.

If it helps you sleep at night I can honestly tell you that the friendship bread died peacefully in its sleep.

This really is weighing on me because a very nice man in my choir, Wes, trusted me with his wife’s friendship bread and I don’t even know her. They have since moved back to the Midwest and I think it is because people there don’t accept your friendship bread dough and then murder it. Grown- ups in the Midwest know how to do friendships and what’s more, they know how to do friendship bread.

Wes brought the sacred dough in a nice little plastic baggie with directions stapled on the outside and everything. It was snuggled like a newborn baby waiting to be adopted or at least fostered by me, the new mama of a whole new generation of friendship bread loaves.

The really awful thing is, I took it.

I took it, knowing very well, that I had absolutely no time or dough raising ability for the friendship bread. The friendship bread has very specific instructions that require daily intervention—just like a non-dough baby. The friendship bread dough requires things like daily kneeding, and daily adding new ingredients, and burping (well, maybe that’s the real baby), and the friendship bread dough probably needs fomenting if I’d gotten that far. I had no right to take a bread baby that I knew I didn’t want and couldn’t care for. I was trying to be nice. Pride often disguises itself as “trying to be nice”.

It reminds me of high school psychology classes that send home a fake doll baby for kids to take care of so they learn what hard work it is to take care of a real child and they will delay this pleasure for as long as biologically possible. The schools should really start sending home friendship dough babies – they are a lot more work and would probably not only have the teenagers delaying having babies but delaying bread making. Many less teenagers would decide to be either parents or pastry chefs if we sent them home with dough babies.

Love is like dough. It needs kneeding and adding good ingredients to and caring for. You shouldn’t take someone’s friendship, dough, or love if you can’t care for it. You should just give it back and just say no, thank you. You should stick to “Quick Breads Loving” in the Cookbook of Love. You should not try any fancy loving, that takes anything more than mix, pour, bake and eat. Maybe skip the baking and just eat the raw dough. Actually, maybe all your Love Bread should come pre-made at Safeway if you cannot commit to daily caring for your friendships, and love-ships. You should make sure you have time for friendship and love and if you don’t, you should not let your pride make you take any one’s fomenting baggie of ingredients. They have cared for their little personal baggie of self-ingredients. And what’s more, there are good, capable people out there, maybe not even in the Midwest, who can take care of their friendship better than you can if you can’t commit. Just like there are the right people to take care of your love and friendship and your fomenting baggie of bread dough. We should all be very, very careful who we hand our friendship and love-ship and breadsmanship to. Because if you give it to the wrong person, it could die.

It took me a couple weeks after I grievously buried the friendship bread, but I finally confessed to Wes that I wouldn’t be bringing him a lovely golden loaf of friendship bread. The funny thing is the very next week an alto asked me sweetly if I’d like to do the friendship bread with her. What am I? — in some crazy Midwestern transplanted choir?

I am never being nice to anyone in choir ever again. It just makes me feel bad when I kill their bread.