Saturday, January 30, 2010

18 Degrees

Winter farmers' market booty: arugula, butternut, bread.

The bread was made twelve hours ago by a math PhD student I've known since I was eighteen. That year, he took me to my first and only contra dance, which I wanted badly to like but did not, because sometimes you are not the person you want to be, and also because the contra dance is the group project of the dancing world, plus sweat.

Three years later he served my then-roommate and me mushroom sandwiches made from a specimen he'd found in the scrub land just beyond town. We are, miraculously still alive. Six year afters that, he married a girl who teaches French to preschoolers. They moved to my hometown. They are building an oven in their backyard.

There are the people you can't unravel from your life, who run like the warp to your weft. And then there are the people whose lives glance against yours, just a few skips on the surface, a stone thrown low and true.

I like to eat their bread.

1 comment:

Sarah said...

I liked contra dancing for a while. But then I realized that the creepy old dudes really weren't going to stop coming to the college dances, so I stopped going instead.

Square dancing is cooler. You can pick the people in your square, and don't have to dance with every perv in the room.