Arriving at Vola’s a bit early for dinner with friends, I walked across the dock to wait by a set of benches facing the Potomac.
Old Town bustled that evening, and I took the last empty seat on a bench beside an unassuming elderly woman. Her full attention was on a family busy tossing bread to ducks paddling in the water below.
As I sat down, she nodded a pleasant hello but quickly resumed her study of the family, seeming to focus mostly on a little boy.
Suddenly, the little boy broke from his mother’s grip and bolted past us, missing the old woman’s cane by inches. “Come back here!” the mother shouted as her unruly child chased seagulls from the dock. “One. Two. I better not have to say three!”
The old woman nudged me with her elbow. “Bless her heart. She’s already counted to three at least seven times,” she chuckled and shook her head sympathetically.
I grinned. I have two children, both grown now, but the times that I myself counted to three were not that long ago. I started to say so just as the little boy zipped by us again.
“One!” The mother yelled as she ran behind him.
The old woman touched my arm and nodded toward the disobedient little boy now running in circles around a lamppost, oblivious of his mother’s repetitive counting.
She leaned close and looked at me over her glasses, “That one needed more water in the dough,” she whispered.
I didn’t understand.
“What does that mean?”
She tapped her cane hard on the ground, “He’s too dense!” she clarified with a hearty laugh.
I don’t bake, and for fear of seeming equally dense, I hesitantly asked.
“Did you just compare him to bread?” I grinned, unsure of where this was going.
She jerked her head towards me. “Oh, honey, all of us are a little like bread,” she turned to gaze out across the river and began her explanation.
I wasn’t sure I could listen.
“We’re all born with the right ingredients. We’re all pretty much made from the same recipe. What happens next, well, that’s the tricky part,” she said while mindlessly caressing the curved handle of her cane.
I was listening.
“Early on, we need some things to help us along or we don’t come out right,” she continued. “Some of us just fall apart, like bread with too much flour. Some of us never rise to our potential, too little yeast. That little boy, well he needed more water in his dough so as not to be so dense!” she laughed again at her own harmless jab at the boisterous little boy.
This was getting interesting, but I glanced at my watch and realized I was now late for dinner.
Still, I had to ask. “And then what?”
“Most important thing,” she held a crooked finger in the air and continued, “is once all of the ingredients are mixed together, we have to be kneaded. We all want to be needed!”
She laughed once more, this time at her play on words.
I laughed with her as I stood to leave, now even later for dinner. She held her cane up to stop me.
“So, hopefully in the beginning, all of us are set up with the right ingredients, right proportions and are always kneaded (she winked) because…”. Her voice faded.
“Because?” I pushed. “Because life has a way of baking the hell out of us!”
She rapped her cane against the bench and threw her head back in laughter.
I grinned in appreciation of her humor. “You seem to have come out of the oven just fine!”
For the first time during our conversation she stopped smiling. “
Well, you know a lot can happen to us in a lifetime,” she said, staring wistfully at a water taxi heading downriver. “Life some-times holds us down, squeezes us tight, tries to shape us a certain way.”
It dawned on me, “You mean like a loaf pan?” I almost shouted, so excited to prove I’d caught on.
“Now you’ve got it!” she giggled. “Whatever your loaf pan in life, rise above it!”
She raised her cane high into the air.
“It seems you’ve done just that,” I said.
“And all of that business about life baking us,” she explained. “We need it to happen, even if it’s rough. It’s got to happen. By taking the heat we become beautiful stuff on the inside. Life baked me good sometimes, you see, but I didn’t let what burned me on the outside ruin what I have on the inside.”
“No, you seem to have handled the heat quite well,” I agreed.
She stood slowly and leaned against her cane. “Too much crust and no one cares to find out how beautiful you are on the inside.”
I nodded in agreement.
Before slowly walking away she smiled and patted my arm. “Don’t ever let life make you too crusty.”
