Did you ever have a life-plan that changed radically? Like you thought for sure things were going to take you to the north, but then something happened and you had to turn south? Last week, two events converged and forced me to consider one of the major life-changing incidents in my life. In the resulting soul-searching, I realized a surprising thing about that long-ago incident.
The first event last week was my birthday, when I turned #003A. It is one of my affectations that I use hexadecimal notation for my birthdays (something I started when I turned #002B). If you’re not good at math, just know that I’m going to be getting old soon. The sort of old that makes you think about things.
The second event was a Moth StorySLAM in Ann Arbor on the theme of time. Pondering that theme reminded me of a really dumb thing I did #0027 years ago. Like I have no idea where I’d be, or what I’d be doing, had I not done that dumb thing.
Some people thought it was for the best, but I thought it made an interesting story so I threw my hat in the ring and was lucky enough to be able to tell that story. Here is a version of the story I told last week:
The Wildflour Bakery
My sophomore year of college, almost 40 years ago, I did a really dumb thing resulting in seventy-two hours of community service. I chose the Wildflour Community Bakery to serve out my sentence.
Wildflour was a worker cooperative located over on 4th Avenue in Ann Arbor. Spring break was coming up so my plan was to get the community service over as quickly as possible. At the time, I was an engineering student and I wanted to get back to the business of being me.
The core of the Wildflour team was a wacky collection of hippies. They dressed in jeans, hemp skirts and tie-dye tops. They seemed happy all the time, and managed the bakery by consensus. Basically, they were commies.
They had a motto: Bakers Baking for Peace. Okay, whatever, I thought.
I was a smug a-hole, obviously, and thought they were ridiculous.
There was Brian, who dropped out of U of M, had recently quit the socialist party, and just moved out of his third residential co-op. He seemed like a quitter to me.
There was Kim, a high-school dropout who worked at Wildflour because she believed in Baking for Peace, but also worked at the Pan Tree restaurant because the tips were good. Like, make up your mind.
There was Mike, who liked to go bird watching, attended city council meetings to offer his thoughts, and enjoyed baking. Boring.
And there was Cindy, who spent four years in the Peace Corps and wanted to go back to Africa just to work there, but was dreading having that discussion with her girlfriend. It took a lot for me to leave Ohio to come to Michigan, so I couldn’t process what she was saying.
When I showed up that first day, the bakery didn’t look like much. There was a display counter up front with bread and granola, and the rest of it was work areas and ovens. But it ran as a well-oiled machine. They were used to volunteers and community service folks like me, so they were really good at breaking down the tasks, explaining what had to get done, and keeping everyone busy.
When there wasn’t a specific baking thing to do, there were floors to sweep and equipment to clean. The worst was scrubbing the baseboards, but it had to be done because flour got into everything and everywhere.
I learned how to make granola, sprouted seed breads, and bagels. The cool thing about bagels is you get a wad of dough a little smaller than a baseball, poke your thumb through it and spin it into bagel shape, which, if you’re into that sort of thing, is called a solid torus.
When my 72 hours were up, I made notes about them because I thought they were so odd that I could one day write a story about them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That was just more of me being really dumb. They welcomed me without hesitation, they were kind, and each one of them knew what they were doing and seemed to like what they were doing.
Over the years, as I’ve dealt with a-hole teammates, a-hole customers, and ridiculous bureaucracy, I’ve thought about those four people at the Wildflour bakery: they had it figured out.
Back then, I thought they were ridiculous because they didn’t own cars, or houses, or make a lot of money. But they were all doing something they cared about, and they cared about their communities, and made food that people loved. They even taught me how to spin a bagel into shape.
If I could turn back the clock, I wouldn’t stop my dummy self from getting into trouble. I needed to learn that lesson. Instead, I’d go back and volunteer at the Wildflour for a year, maybe two, because there was a lot more they could teach me.
Meanwhile, at My Writing Desk…
Last week was also a beast for me because my wife was in a local production of The Music Man and I held down the fort while she was in tech rehearsals, dress rehearsals, and a weekend full of shows. Also, I went to all the performances. Also, we had house guests and had to clean the house. Also, we still have three dogs. Also, I was approached by police while walking the dogs at midnight because cows had escaped a local farm and were roaming through our subdivision; the cops wanted to know if I’d seen any cows (I hadn’t, but I assisted in the search).
I did what I consider the bare minimum of writing, but I did complete the rewrite of my 10,000 word short story by rewriting all 10,000 words. I’m polishing it this week, and then I hope to share it with y’all soon.
Also, I made this yard sign in case the neighbors got upset about cows popping in their yard.
Maybe You’d Like
I’m working with some other speculative and sci-fi authors this month in a promotion called: Forward to the Future.
Sci-fi used to be my only reading material, and it’s still a fun genre with great potential for satirizing our current world while posing interesting questions about how we want to live. So check out these covers and see if anything strikes you as interesting, then go check them out.
Next Picayune
I have a few unpublished humor pieces I’m hoping to share. They were rejected by my preferred humor publications, and now they’re destined for the Island of Unwanted Toys. That doesn’t mean they won’t be fun.
Thanks for reading the Mickey Picayune.
All the best,
–mickey
P.S. #003A is 58 in decimal. I discuss why I do this over at my Blog of Ages.