When I was a kid, my mother ground wheat once a week in this huge, loud machine, then used the flour to make seven loaves of whole wheat bread. As an obnoxious child, I found this ordinary and boring, and I always wanted white Butterkrust bread from the store. My Grandma Hill, who lived with us three months out of the year, always railed on that “store bought doughy white gook.” One summer, a friend from San Antonio stayed with us for a week. Kevin was blown away to have homemade bread, then doubly blown away when my mom pulled out tubs of homemade jam she had made. Kevin would sit in the kitchen and eat slice after slice after slice and just shake his head at how good it all was.
The one drawback of homemade bread is that it has to be hand sliced. Since we ate roughly one loaf per day and since I often had early morning workouts, I was frequently the person who cut the first slices of the bread. Have I mentioned that I am a disaster with my hands?
Inevitably, later in the morning, Mom would come into the kitchen and want bread. She would open the partly cut loaf, sigh heavily, and exclaim, “Gordon, Jr., have you been cutting the bread again?”
“Yeah,” I would reply.
“Damnation, son! I cannot fathom how you cannot cut straight down!” Sometimes, she would say, “Come over here and watch!”
I would go stand next to her, and she would cut away a piece that was always misshapen—fat on top, skinny on bottom—as the correction piece. Then she would cut three or four perfectly even, perfectly straight pieces. Every once in a while, she would hand me the knife and say, “You try again.” Then she would stand at my elbow as I mangled another slice.
“I just don’t understand,” she would say. “You are so damn smart but cannot slice bread to save your life.”
I hear those conversations in my mind all the time now. Our friend Michelle runs a bakery and makes tremendous fresh bread—honey oat, white, and wheat. The wheat is exactly like my mother’s. We buy several loaves a week. I can barely stand store bought bread when we run out. The kids love it too. But just look at Graham’s slices.
I always know when he has had fresh bread for breakfast—the loaf is crazy slanted, and 25 percent of the loaf is gone. It takes me two correction slices to get the loaf straight, and I find myself muttering, “Damnation, son. You’re so smart. Why can’t you cut bread?”
The upside, though? At age 46, Mom, I can cut bread.
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