At Christmas dinner my daughter asked each of us to tell about our favorite Christmas food. When it came my turn I did not hesitate before replying “butterflake rolls straight from the oven at the Tasty Bakery.”
During my growing up years my dad ran the Tasty Bakery in Ponca City, a retail bakery that he operated from 1948 when we moved to Ponca from Muskogee until 1967 when he and Mom moved to Phoenix for her health. Christmas Eve was the busiest day of the year, so after reaching junior high age or so we three boys were recruited as additional hands for the operation. Nothing fancy, just the usual kind of step’n’fetch it kind of labor we were all familiar with. By lunchtime (Dad had been at the shop since 4 a.m., so it was closer to 11 than to 12), he would send someone to the neighboring grocery store there on West Grand Avenue to get some butter and he would put a pan of butterflake rolls in the rotary oven to bake. When they were done, we could hardly wait for them to cool before they were broken open, slathered in butter, and the pan was devoured by our family and the help.
I know that my Dad was an exceptional baker, but I also strongly suspect that part of the sweetness of those rolls was that the biblical punishment of “getting thy bread by the sweat of thy face” gave the getting a special sweetness. Meaningful work is sometimes hard to come by, but my father always understood that it was not the work but the family and friends that come with it that are what provide meaning to activities which to many would seem repetitive and pointless. I have been blessed with decades of what many would consider a continual slog to go one more place and develop one more course to one more group of workers. But I too have found both satisfaction and friendship in the doing. My only regret is that it was not a labor I could share with my family.
Karen Kay and I recently finished my oral reading of Arlo Crawford’s A Farm Dies Once a Year, detailing his summer visit as a young, dissatisfied adult back to the family farm in Pennsylvania where he grew up. But he was not a farm kid of the kind I knew, whose families had lived on the land for generations. His father and mother had, as young hippies, decided to go back to the land and grow vegetable. That decision had not only provided for his family and given his children excellent college educations, but it had also enriched his neighbors and apprenticed scores of younger aspiring farmers. It also taught Arlo and his sister the nature of meaningful work from an early age. Yet Arlo, after that summer did not want to be a farmer. But like me the experience freed him to pursue meaningful work of his own shaping.
I hope your choices have worked out as well for you, and I would love to hear your stories of growing up and of growing old.
