Six months later, in another family...

In loving memory of those we lost on December 14th, please read the story of Daniel Barden's family in the Washington Post. Daniel and Noah were classmates. One senseless act of armed savagery, so many shattered lives...

Dear little Noah...

It's been a long time since I last wrote to you. Almost six months, to be exact. My last letter was put in your casket on the day of your funeral. I remember tearing pages off a notebook, putting pen to paper, feeling the words pour out in painful gushes, then rolling the pages in a tight cylinder and tying them with a piece of ribbon that had last been used around a present, possibly for your sixth birthday the month before. I made sure the ribbon ends curled gently upward, soft and almost weightless, like wings. The wings your mom said you dreamed of having...
Since then many things have happened that we won't talk about because you are still a little boy.  Only six and a half. Sometimes when I see you in my mind, you are older though. Seven or eight maybe. I don't know why. Maybe because time doesn't work where you are the way it works on earth. Each time I make a conscious effort to bring you back to the same age as your twin sister or your cousins. Four grandchildren born within less than six months of each other. One in the middle of the country, two in the Northeast and one in the West. Because of the distance and work and the cost of airfare, you guys didn't get to spend a lot of time together but we all knew that one day you'd make a fantastic foursome, if only at family reunions...
Some say you have to have lived with someone to really feel the absence and mourn the loss. It may be true of some people. I don't know. What I do know is that, wherever they live, my grandchildren are woven into who I am and there is a Noah-shaped hole in the fabric of my soul where you used to be. That hole will never be patched.
I have seen you several times in my dreams since that fateful day in December and each time you were laughing and running around, as full of life as ever. As if you had transfered all your energy into the new you and were still the same. It makes me glad. But I still grieve for you and for all you have lost. I wish you could have your old life back. I wish we could all still have you.
Last summer we read about Lewis and Clark and how they crossed the country from the Midwest to where we live now. Your eyes went wide as we talked about grizzlies, cougars, rushing waters, deep snow, powerful chiefs and fortified camps.
This year since we have just been to San Antonio, Texas, we would have talked about Davy Crockett and the Alamo and I would have told you how the ranger asked me to remove my sunhat as a sign of respect when we entered the shrine and I said that I would if he insisted but that in the old days women were actually expected to keep their heads covered in church, how he replied that he didn't know and was thankful for the information and asked me to please keep my hat on then. I am sure you would have liked that story.
My phone and my computer are full of pictures. Seeing your happy little face popping up all over my screens, I can't accept that you are no longer of this world. I just can't.
So I want you to know that I remember. Six months ago tomorrow morning, you were already gone when I woke up. I didn't know that. None of us did. I did not feel anything amiss as I brewed coffee and skimmed through the daily paper. Then the phone rang and our world shifted.
Who could have predicted this? Noah, I am so sorry! So, so sorry! The grown-up world has failed you horribly and still does. How can people not understand that, yes, guns don't kill, but if your killer hadn't had a gun, you might still be alive...
Please come back and visit in my dreams. I'll show you the raspberry bushes, the baby tomatoes and the budding pears and we will fill the feeder for the hummingbirds and watch for butterflies. I'll tell you about small birds ganging up on hawks to chase them away from their nests and bald eagles sitting on lampposts and staring at us as we cross the bridge for my daily treatments. I will tell you about the beaver dam we saw yesterday and the warning signs about bears and cougars. I can't wait to have you over...
Please come back.

Of bread and bridges: a baking weekend in San Antonio

The Bread Bakers Guild of America (BBGA) held another of its outstanding regional events this past weekend in San Antonio, Texas, and I was lucky enough to be able to attend it. The topic was "All About Ciabatta." I already knew the instructor, Didier Rosada, for having taken a couple of memorable classes with him at the San Francisco Baking Institute, a few years back.
I had seen how simple mixtures of flour, salt, yeast and water morph under his care into voluptuously silky and bubbling organisms that almost seem to purr as they spring to life. I knew him for a natural born teacher whose knowledge of dough chemistry and physics and all things bread is encyclopedic.  I fondly remembered his sunny Southwestern-France accent and his easy laughter, not to mention his gift for languages (Didier switches effortlessly from English to French to Spanish and back) and I knew the class was going to be a unique experience. I wasn't disappointed.
We did indeed learn all about ciabatta and made several different ones, using various preferments and methods. My two favorites were probably the poolish-based one with double hydration (the first one I will try to make when I get back home) and the power ciabatta (loaded with "good for you" nutrients) which we loosely shaped and baked into twists. I am usually not a huge fan of commercial yeast: I like the taste of levain, especially when it is both mild and complex but the class convinced that with proper pre-fermentation one can indeed make wondrously tasty breads using instant yeast. The Man's pick was the breakfast ciabatta, also poolish-based and studded with dark chocolate chunks and pieces of candied orange peel. The formula includes eggs and butter, everything he loves and is supposed to eat only exceptionally. Luckily his birthday is right around the corner...

We had arrived one day early to take in the sights, mostly the Alamo, the cathedral, the Mexican market and the River Walk. Coming from 58°F and overcast skies in Seattle however, the 97°F Texas weather was a bit of a shock. We baked in more way than one all weekend and didn't get to see or do all we had planned but we still fell under the spell of the city, its winding river and its many bridges.

Although we took back with us the best ciabattas of our lives, I am under no illusion that I will be able to emulate Didier's talent anytime soon, if ever. But I'll certainly do my best to apply what he taught us and share it on this blog. I just need to find out first how much time and energy I will have for baking and blogging once my treatment for breast cancer starts in earnest (we are still waiting for some test results), and get organized.

Didier's next BBGA event is scheduled for this fall at the International Baking Industry Exposition in Las Vegas. It will be a lecture on Las Buenas Practicas de Panificación (The Best Practices of Bread Baking) and he will deliver it in Spanish, together with Juan Manuel Martinez, a talented and passionate artisan baker from Bogotá, Colombia, who taught a popular class at WheatStalk last year. Considering the growing number of Spanish-speakers employed in artisan bakeries across America, I suspect the event will be mobbed.
Didier and Juan Manuel have co-authored Pan, Sabor y Tradición, a bread book which will hopefully be soon translated into English and made available in this country, and together with Miguel Galdós, another master baker (or "bread boy" as they like to call themselves), he has founded El Club del Pan (The Bread Club). I especially like El Club del Pan's videos. Such is the power of images that even non-Spanish speakers might find them instructive. Check them out and some of the magic may rub off onto your baking hands. I certainly hope it will onto mine!

May 14th, 2013

Thirty years ago today, I married the man I live with. Five months ago today, we lost our grandson Noah in a mass murder in Sandy Hook, CT. We like to think of Time in terms of growth and change and growing older together offers daily opportunities for both. But when Time is brutally interrupted, as it was on December 14th, 2012, it comes to a painful standstill. I look at my other six-year old grandson - six weeks younger than Noah and now, of course, older than his cousin - and I grieve for the little boy who wasn't allowed to become what he was meant to be.
I grieve for him and I grieve for our family. As if it were not tragic enough that Noah was murdered, five months later, parts of our family are being ripped asunder by brutal internal forces which compound the pain and suffering by destroying the bonds that would make mourning a little less unbearable. Sadly, post-traumatic shock syndrome has become our reality.
But the ties that the Man and I forged on May 14, 1983 are stronger and more alive than ever. There is immense comfort in finding the same partner by your side, day in and day out, in sickness and in health, in sadness and in joy, in having your hand fit into another's hand whose warmth and touch are as familiar as your own, more maybe, in knowing that, every day, you have the unique power to make someone's world a little brighter that it would otherwise be and that he has the same power in return. Time, interrupted, will never be repaired but there is much to be said for enduring love. My wish for the future is that it will one day be allowed to prevail again.

Mother's Day 2013

Mother's Day is hard on all the families who ever lost a child, especially the twenty-six Sandy Hook families. No words can express their sorrow and the huge gaps in their lives where theirs kids should be.
As I have so many times over the years, today I am turning to my mother for comfort. She passed away in early 2010 and I like to think of her alive in another world fussing over Noah. She never met him in real life (they lived an ocean apart and he was only three when she died) but she had been plied with pictures of him and his siblings since the day they were born and she was very familiar with their faces and antics.
We had bought her a digital photo frame and she had put it on a chest of drawers near her TV set. It was always on, even at night. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether she was watching a show or watching her family although pictures of her great-grandchildren always made her eyes shine in a way TV never did. I am pretty sure she has never let Noah out of her sight since he joined her in this other life I like to dream about.
There is some degree of solace in imagining both of them together. But nothing will ever change the fact that Noah should still be with his family and looking forward to a long life on this Earth as should all the little kids who were murdered on December 14th. This Mother's Day is indeed very hard but then, we already know that all the ones that follow will be just as painful. Wherever she is, I know my mother knows it too and grieves for all of us especially, as I do, for my daughter Veronique, Noah's mom.

My dad took the top picture in 1948: my mom was 34. I took the bottom one in the summer of 2009: she was 95. In between the two, a lifetime of love. On this very difficult Mother's Day, I draw my strength from my mother's continuing and loving presence in my  heart. Merci, maman!