Just a corpuscle in a giant organism, flowing along the stream

The bread courses through the bakery like blood, mixed, panned, proofed, depanned, cooled and bagged over a four-hour cycle, trucked all over the Western United States, Alberta, Canada and Hawaii. We make artisan organic bread in a mass production environment, each stage of the process in groups of six to ten, becoming the corpuscles and platelets of a living organism, making a living product of whole grain flours, yeast and sugar, baked with care.

In the mixing department the ingredients are measured out and rolled station-to-station in 400-pound stainless steel bowls that gleam inside from careful cleaning. They roll like coal bins over a smooth red floor, a floor maintained at intervals with an industrial cleaning machine called a floor cat, which resembles a miniature Zamboni, stiff circular brushes rotating on its underside, a water vac and a large squeegee at the back. Driving the floor cat is a rank of privilege--only senior team members get the assignment, clearing their way with warning toots of the horn as they make tight circles about the production floor.

It's a regimented workplace. Safety glasses, hairnets and ear plugs are required everywhere. We wear plain brown bakery-issued shirts with snaps instead of buttons, the same drab color (just lighter than brown khakis) for our bakery pants, becoming an army of washed-out UPS men as we scurry about our tasks. It's very leveling and democratic, though managers wear black polos. Team leads and supervisors are all in brown like us.

The regularity and regimentation centers me. Monday night we made 30,000 loaves of whole grain bread, filling racks, rolling them into the proofer, mopping floors and scrubbing dishes and we rotated through stations. The bakery feeds us lunch and provides snacks like steel cut oatmeal, vegetables with hummus and yogurt for prework and breaks. Who does that? Around the country most large corporations are busy shelling out bonuses to upper management and sending jobs to Asia. Bread has to be baked reasonably near where it's eaten, but it isn't hard to envision a future where most of us will be replaced by robotic arms and sensors. The dough is no longer rolled by hand, and technology advances every year.

It seems like a reality our country is ill-prepared for. Revolutions are painful. The nature of work is undergoing a profound change. Whole industries will disappear over the next few years. Soon there will no longer be bakery workers or truck drivers or order pullers, only the technicians smart enough to maintain the machines. I'm nearing the end of my working life anyway, so I'd likely transition to subsistence living, reading, writing, taking long walks. It doesn't sound that frightening to me. But what about the millions of ordinary people abruptly stripped of a way to make a living and the foundation for a meaningful life? What will they do? How will they support themselves? The current political leadership seems ill-equipped to handle that massive conundrum with any kind of wisdom or compassion. Meanwhile change hurtles on. In Dubai they are experimenting with air taxis, self-piloted drones and helicopters capable of zipping passengers around the city. Our world isn't as organized and purposeful as the bakery: an egotistical, narcissistic fool threatens to destroy humankind with casual tweets about the size of his nuclear button. How did we come to this? How do we find our way out?

The truth is never simple. It has a few corners that can never be cleaned.

My mother was heroic for her courage, endurance and strength, but there was another side to her. She could be very cold and distant. She could wound with quick, harsh sarcasm, or an icy, uncrossable ocean of silence. She could be brutal and cruel, out of a fierce anger at the life she had come to, its complete lack of graces.

Growing up this way, at one turn her comfort and confidant, at another her profoundest disappointment, left me hopelessly, deeply scarred. I struggled all my life in my relationships with women and my ability to respond to intimacy. I wounded and used people, prone to irrational anger and abrupt changes of mood and tone. I too practiced an icy, cutting silence that built walls and distrust. I have been married four times, all colossal failures.

I carried around a baseline of anxiety that underscored and undercut every interaction with bosses, friends, supervisors and love interests. For a long time I covered it up with an impossibly wide, happy smile, determined to be the ray of sunshine no one could dislike. My insecurity, fear, temper and fundamental anger betrayed me again and again

It's taken a lot of self-examination to reach this point in my journey, where I could tell what I know of the story and look inward with frank honesty. I'm privileged to write every day. I want to tell stories, and not just a self-indulgent one of my own.

Her hands were raw, red and cracked

My mother cleaned with fierceness. She would scrub and scrape until her hands were raw, red and cracked, slathering them with lotions or bag balm only to start cleaning again. She would clean from habit and duty. She cleaned because it was ingrained in her culture, for Germans are a tidy people with a deep love of order.

But it was deeper than that. On the farm it seemed she cleaned determined to scrub away poverty and shame. She cleaned too to quiet herself, to wash the reality of her bad bargain and shameful mistake out of her mind, drive it away in a frenzy of work. Then too, she had six kids. Keeping them fed and cleaned was endless, especially when coupled with animals to feed, crops to irrigate and cows to milk. She had six children in 12 years, and at least one miscarriage. We were irrigating the watermelons when she told me. I was just ten, the summer after third grade. Through everything she kept working.

Rosemarie didn't drive. The few times the Old Man tried to teach her he lost patience quickly and started to berate her unwillingness to learn, her dense German stupidity. In his frequent absences we were stranded 8 miles from town, either relying on neighbors or packing the whole brood into a cab. On the way home everyone held groceries or a baby, or both. No one wore seat belts, and if Mr. Thompson or Mr. Douthit took us, the older kids rode sitting in the bed of the pickup. It was a much different time.

The start of her emancipation came in 1964 when he consented to buy her an ancient blue-green Nash, a squat four-door automobile with dusty beige seats that smelled a little from long storage.  A kindly family friend, Orville, patiently showed her how to work the break and the clutch. She practiced out in the pasture before taking to the road. Orville and his wife lived in Athena, a few miles east and then north. Hes invited one of the kids to stay at their home, but he only wanted the younger children. They had  chocolate graham cracker ice cream bars in their freezer, he said. Eager for adventure, I'd stretch up and say, "I'll go."

"I KNOW you would," he said, chuckling with his barrel-voiced, cigarette-soaked laughter. He only wanted the younger kids, but they were skittish about leaving home.

The Nash had a touchy clutch that had nearly worn out, so the standard practice was to roll through stop signs, including the one that led from East Walls Road to the main highway. Children were assigned as lookouts left and right, calling "Clear!" as mom sailed onto the main highway. A full stop and the car might die, and it was difficult to restart. Somehow we survived the clears.

Later that year she got her first job off the farm, working as a waitress at a truck stop in Umatilla, about 10 miles away. At 8 my sister Therese was in charge of the kids, oversaw bath times, made something for dinner. She did a marvelous, mature job, spooning baby food to Michael and then Monika, except for the time she coaxed Roger into drinking from a cup of bleach. Another science experiment, like the corn grown in a patch at the end of the trickle. A neighbor rushed him to Good Shepherd Hospital in town. The emergency room staff induced vomiting and he was fine. Years later the childhood near-miss is still holiday conversation. Therese, almost saintly in her devotion and maturity at that young age, still shrugs off her curious misstep. "I wanted to see what would happen," she said.

She had this prankster side, this coyote cunning that belied her bright, sweet disposition. One day I got a white straw cowboy hat as a gift and I was strutting around proudly as we played and then did the evening milking. She wanted to wear it but I refused. Therese snatched it off my head and plopped it in a fresh manure pile. Another time, she and my second-oldest brother (he's skittish about being identified on social media) were playing and climbing on some hardened stacks of concrete behind the milking shed. Therese pushed one onto to his head and it made him bleed, a gash, not serious.

How could anyone so ordinarily gentle and nurturing be full of so much devilment? Therese was a model student and startlingly bright. She's worked on the computers at the Portland Public Schools for 30 years.

We were a wild, brown bunch, scarcely ever wearing shoes in the summer. We outgrew them too quickly anyway. My smaller toes are still curled from wearing too-small shoes. At 20 I had the feet of an ancient.

In 1965 Rosemarie took the Nash to Pendleton, the county seat, to take a test for a government program called the MTDA, the Manpower Training and Development Act. Programs that don't exist anymore because they are "entitlements." She took me with her as moral support, to calm her nerves for the big day. If she passed, she go to Blue Mountain Community College and learn a skill, perhaps raise the family out of rural poverty.

In addition to the testing there were interviews, an entire day of qualifying. She wore her best blue dress. I was the smart one, her oldest child, a visual aid to show she wasn't merely a backward German with six children and her accented English. Yet all of my siblings have been more successful in their adult life.

Scraping away the crud

Tap tap. Tap tap tap.

The steady beat of the pan line is the sanest thing in my life right now. Work grounds me. Slinging bread pans and breaking a sweat. Earning a living. I'm grateful for the regularity, the rhythm and routine.

After the bread comes out of the proofer it's baked on racks in stand-up ovens, typically at 355 degrees. Another team rolls them in and out of the ovens, taking the baked bread to a conveyor called the depanner. One member of the ovens crew is assigned to load them off the racks onto a conveyor belt, where the still-hot loaves are blown free by a burst of air and then suctioned out of the pans.

The crew rotates in 30-minute shifts on the depanner position, the alpha job in the bakery. If you can run the depanner you're recognized as full-fledged crew member, a person who can hold his own. It takes strength, endurance and toughness.

They wear safety glasses, special sleeves on their forearms and long rectangular heat pads attached to their wrists by elastic. The ovens and racks are hot enough to burn skin instantly, as dangerous as unacknowledged grief. Quick, deep burns happen if you mishandle a pan or take a rack out of the oven without being careful.

Once the racks are emptied they are rolled over to a  double line along the north wall of the proofer to cool until they can be filled again.

The floor space where the cooling racks are stored becomes littered with fallen crumbs and seed from baking. There's a little oil in the recipe, so this builds up quickly, forms a layer on the floor.

Tap tap. Tap tap tap.

The line runs continuously. We bake more than a half million loaves a week, all day and all night in shifts. Periodically the line is taken down for cleaning, every conveyor, machine, corner and cranny swept, scrubbed, and sanitized, first with air hoses and then with buckets and brushes, blue plastic buckets for cleaner/degreaser, white for sanitizer, yellow buckets and brushes for the floor and floor-level surfaces.

After a few days the space under the cooling racks develops a layer of fallen detritus that has to be worked off with a tool, a four-foot aluminum handle with a  four-inch scraper attached to its business end, not sharp enough to cut but sharp enough to work up the crust of crud on the floor.

Scraping the crud is my favorite job in the bakery, along with taking a scrub brush the size of an outsized tooth brush to the fixtures, pipes, baseboards and stanchions along the walls and corners, making sure everything is clean and sanitized throughout the production floor.

It's deeply satisfying to me, left to work alone on a task no one wants. I love seeing the results, love being acknowledged or praised for completing it, making the grimiest, most ignored corners of the bakery clean enough to pass any inspection. We get them regularly, from corporate headquarters, from the state. They are called audits. Everyone snaps to attention for pending audits, but the standard of cleanliness is constant. We bake the staff of life, trustees of people's food.

No matter how careful we are, there's a crust of crud that falls to the floor in our lives, one that congeals to our souls over time. It has to be worked away. We have to find the neglected corners and crevices of our past and attend to them, scrub away the neglect. If we don't, something terrible grows within us, unclean and unexamined. A fungus of hurt, searing, tamped-down hurt, is the most toxic.

There's another level the cleaning assignments appeal to me in their solitude and simplicity. It's a connection to my mother.

Rosemarie Newton was a remarkable woman. She came to America at 16, a child-bride of an American soldier whose one mistake became a quiet international scandal in Darmstadt in 1955. She crossed the ocean in a slow boat to America with a squalling baby in her arms. She was sick and sorrowful for the entire crossing, wrest from her mother and two brothers, though bound to the land of Elvis, Hershey bars and Frank Sinatra. The baby was me.

The hastily-discharged private had very little except an eighth-grade education and a capacity to dream. They lived in rundown rented houses or a tiny trailer house while he raised watermelons on rented land and drove truck. One morning she spied a rat by my brother's ear in his crib.

Three children came quickly and four more followed.

When I was 5 Everett, my father, scraped up enough money to buy a place, a 60-acre farm 8 miles outside Hermiston in Eastern Oregon, the family crammed into a ramshackle two bedroom farmhouse with peeling linoleum in the kitchen and an ancient refrigerator and range, a tiny old-style sink. The dining area had a oil stove with a knotty pine wall behind it.

When I was 7 my grandfather built us a shotgun third bedroom to the left of the stove, a project he completed on his vacation while grandma made scrapple in the kitchen with cornmeal and the meat from a boiled hog's head, lifting the head out of large pot with a giant set of tongs. I was dubious and alarmed, but the fried scapple was delicious, though not a breakfast approved by the American Heart Association.

Four of us crammed into two beds. Michael, another boy with almost-white hair, made it five soon after, and Monika, a beautiful baby girl, arrived by the time my mother was 25.

This image from Steve Frazier photography; our farm,
though at the end of a lane, was less grand.

The lawn was weeds. An overflowing septic tank trickled out a few feet from the front porch. My sister Therese grew an eight-foot high patch of corn another 30 feet along the trickle, an observant scientific mind even then.

Farm life was mean in places, and we clung to each other. Soon we were old enough to be aware of my mother's growing despair, talking to herself in the kitchen in German as she prepared meals in the tiny kitchen. Mice scurried through the cupboards. We were horrified to have guests. "Your teeth are YELLOW," a little girl once said to me on the school bus.

Before long we were old enough for farm chores. I drove tractor and farm trucks by the time I was 8, milking a small herd of cows before school. One summer my brother and I were given charge of a plot of field corn, irrigating it every Tuesday with curved pipes that drew the water from a ditch. The Ditch Rider, a county employee, made sure you didn't take water any other day.

We became old enough too to hear and see the ugliness in my parents' marriage. Love wasn't safe. He had affairs, even a secret second family on the road. They screamed at each other. He raised his fists to her, beat us savagely with a belt. It wasn't about discipline, it was pure, raw anger at the world. The best he could do was far short of enough. A coarse, uneducated man, he would relieve himself in the toilet while we took baths, idly scratching his scrotum while he lectured us on carelessness or the occasional poor grade. I still remember the stench of him, discovering while still a hairless child that I did not love or respect my father; I only feared him.

Love wasn't safe in that household. Affection could be given or taken away in an instant. The searing ugly scenes we saw, brutal things that were nothing like The Wonderful World of Disney or My Three Sons. One summer afternoon a lineman from the electric co-op walked up the lane. He seemed a hero from the Old West to me striding in his jeans and massive tool belt with hammers dangling like six guns. I followed him like a puppy, peppering and pestering him with questions. He was there to shut off the electricity. For six weeks my mother cooked and boiled water over a fire near the pump shed. The Old Man was building a dam somewhere on the Snake River.

The ugliness grew and we clung to each other, inventing games that took us out to the junkyard and outbuildings, or hoeing and weeding in the Eastern Oregon sun until there were blisters on our backs. They would have strange, passionately intense reunions, fondling each other on a lawn chair in the shade. I couldn't understand the giving and the loathing, sometimes hours apart. The shouting. It was all so raw.

The crud accumulates until you scrape it away.

A landslide of the heart

I woke up around 9:30, called a couple of my favorite people, my best friend Eileen and my brother Frank, then straightened up my ridiculously messy room. I discarded the embarrassing collection of papers, old mail and wrappers, took wine glasses to the sink and washed them, folded the clothes and put them away. I unpacked from my Christmas trip. I feel lighter and more whole. I still haven't made the bed.

It took till 11:30 to finish the chores. By then I was massively hungry. In the kitchen I found two slabs of sourdough bread, cut off a half-inch slice of ham and four pieces of swiss cheese with some mustard and assembled a sandwich. I'm a big boy. I like to eat.

I took the sandwich to my desk and lit a candle. It's mealtime, and a candle invites the sacred. A person should never eat alone so I opened the blog to write a post. You are my company today, and I treasure that.

There's something about the combination of a long trip, calling special people, doing chores and eating a massive ham sandwich that makes you reflective. I particularly like this song and this version of it, "Landslide," performed by the Dixie Chicks in a live performance somewhere in Europe (Sweden, maybe? Not sure about that part.)

The song touches me and stays with me these days, for a variety of reasons. The beautiful clear voices. The crush-worthy lead singer. The tender strains of the mandolin. And of course the lyrics and their message:

Well, I've been afraid of changin'
'Cause I've built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I'm getting older, too

We all have songs that become touchstones, windows into our hopes and soul. It's magical how music can do that, lift us to the best part of ourselves, express our sadness, longing, meaning and need better than we can ever hope to. This song plays in my Pandora nearly every day.

I was singing the chorus in my halting tenor as I did my chores, feeling a tremendous comfort.

I AM getting older, but getting bolder is a choice, I believe. A lot of people face their advancing generations and become more careful, which I think that is a tragic, disastrous, calcifying mistake. My grandpa was a vigorous man who built his own house with his own hands at 63. He got a little help with the plumbing and wiring, but structure and the carpentry were all his. Then he retired and sat in a chair. He got Alzeimer's. By the end of his life he couldn't recognize his wife of 60-plus years.

Getting older makes me think of the journeys I could take, the choices I might make and the direction they could start me toward in my life. It's exhilarating to see possibilities instead of sameness.

A list in forming in my head, and this is the first time I've sat down to put it to paper, albeit between bites of enormous, delicious ham sandwich.

These are choices I could make, some of them mutually exclusive. All of them will alter my path in marvelous ways, while certainly a few wouldn't turn out at all. It's wonderful to feel at 62 there are adventures to be had, that I can grow and learn and discover and make changes. I can pay more attention to the road I travel, the souls I touch along the way. Robert Frost said, "But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep."

Frost's poems have been cited and recited so much that the metaphors have been worn out by less subtler minds, leaving a road with potholes and a crumbling stone fence at its edges. In "Stopping by the woods on a snowy evening" and "The Road Not Taken" he talks both about how one path closes another and the subtle seductions of merely giving up, letting yourself sleep, lulled by the rhythm of the bells on the harness as the snows fall.

Sorry for the mock profundity. Just trying to learn to write pretty. This is my list so far, with items that are both little and big in their scope:

Learn to play guitar (that's on everyone's list, I think. It'd be nice to play a song or three, sing them one day with my granddaughter,)

Join a writer's group.

Take a cross country trip. Read the historical plaques. Hike the Grand Canyon. Stop for pie. Flirt with the waitress. Attend college football in various towns and write a blog about it.

Own a place of my own, my own apartment, a 600-square-foot trailer, something. I've always wanted an office and a study, three bookcases, a good chair and reading lamp, a cherry wood desk like the one I had before the last time I was homeless. (Another story, preceded by bad choices.)

Get a job at Eastern Washington University, something simple, be a janitor or academic advisor or part of the landscape crew, attend classes one or two a quarter. It's close enough to my grandkids I could go to soccer games, far enough away that I wouldn't intrude on their family,

As an exercise, write a novel about Cullen Bohannon's journey East.

Open a bookstore, a coffee shop or a brew pub. I'd want it to be a shoestring business where the chief purpose was to have a pot of coffee on and talk to people. I had the thought earlier this week that a sense of community is disappearing from our lives, that no one is really good at it anymore except women, who seem to make and keep strong friendships in their lives that make a difference. Eileen is a whiz at it, whole communities of women in her life that support each other and have rich, healing, joyous conversations. I'd like to be a part of a place that fosters that for myself and other people, a church without a collection place or a ponderous pastor. Main street is gone in America, killed by Amazon, Walmart and the invention of the smart phone. All we have left is Facebook, a sad substitute.

The trouble with working in a bar or convenience store is that you are surrounded by smokers and drunks while you're not drinking.

Continue working at the bakery and save money for my retirement.

Get an online degree in counseling and establish a practice in a small town.  Base the therapy on the principles of Carl Adler, "warm, positive, acceptant."

Buy a motorcycle, learn to ride and maintain the bike. I am a ridiculous shell of what a man should be--I can't fix anything. I'd like to learn from the ground up. It'd be my Walden. I'm sure it would be good for me as long as I didn't hit a tree.

Take a long motorcycle trip with my brothers, although they are complete clowns and would probably steer me into a tree trying to keep up with them.

A risk I'm willing to take, because I'd much rather die with boots and helmet on than in a chair.

"Mary Jane's Last Dance" is on now, so I think I'll get up and dance. Gotta work off this ham sandwich.

I have been bruised by the roads I've taken, and I have been shaped by them. I don't regret any of my travels, even the ones I found painful and costly. I realize I have to choose carefully from this point forward. I only have time for a few more journeys and the miles are precious.

Disaster reorders our lives in marvelous ways

Henry David Thoreau was the first blogger. He set a very high bar.

I don't like reading my old posts, not at all. They sound whiny and glib and inauthentic. This is a different time than all the times before it, however. For me blogging is chiefly about developing a voice and learning to see in clear, genuine ways. Capture details. Be in the moment with experience. If I ever write about a woman/love interest again, please shoot me. That's tedious.

At the bakery where I work the pan line forms the beating heart of the make-up department. The pans come together on a conveyor under the roller with a steady tap. Tap. Tap. Tap Tap Tap.

Jack and Mario run the divider, the section of the work that includes the dough divider, a lift that carries balls of bread overhead, the roller, and then an electronic eye that drops the formed loaves into pans.

Names are changed here to prevent me getting nabbed for an immediate trip to HR.

Jack's the veteran of the group, the steady hand who commands the middle. He watches the bread line with his thumbs under his armpits and his legs spread wide, calmly until something goes wrong. He's serious, a man of average height with a Lincoln-shaped beard who used to work on a sub tender in the Navy. "Know what Navy stands for?" he asks, quickly providing the answer, "Never Again Volunteer Yourself."

Jack's an iconoclast and a skeptic. At the shift meeting he piped up, "It's my Friday. I've got my sarcasm face on so don't mess with me today."

I asked Jack about the tap, tap, tap, that it sounded like a heartbeat. He said, "When I first got this position I learned to listen for the sounds the pan line makes. If it's not making them  I know something is wrong." I suspect working on the sub tender was the same way. Men who are good at working with machinery understand the beating heart of it.

I came to the bakery at the end of the summer. I'd been driving for Uber for two years until one Saturday morning a young woman with no insurance backed blindly out of her driveway and plowed into the side of my car, missing my face, shoulder and ribs by about five inches. The passenger door collapsed but held, and my passenger wasn't hurt. I'd picked her up from the airport and we were about two blocks from her house. She was lovely about it.

Just like that, I had smashed car and no job.  Uber insurance only covered a third of the cost to fix it after a $1000 deductible and a cynical lowball of the claim, so I was stuck. My sister lent me a thousand dollars that got me through September. I didn't even ask her. "Pay it forward," she said.

I starting temping to keep afloat, until one day I got an assignment at the bakery shipping depot with a team from production. It was a great night. We worked in a sweat and plowed through 20 pallets of frozen bread, dating it and loading it into trays. It was like football practice. The positivity and teamwork were infectious. Three people, supervisors at the plant, said to me, "You're doing great. Are you looking for a job?"

I applied online the minute I got home, working four more times as a temp while I went through the screening and interview process. For the first time in ages I had a home, a place where the standard was simple, just work as hard as everybody else and be appreciated. They feed us lunch every day, steel-cut oatmeal at the steam table before shift. An army travels on its stomach.

When the worst possible thing happens, or what we think is the worst possible thing, it can be very liberating. Disaster reorders our lives in marvelous ways. It got me a home and a place to work, good money to travel to Idaho for Christmas and spend too much on presents.  I have dreams now. I could get my master's in counseling, or buy a motorcycle and take a cross-country trip with my brothers (be a hell of a book) or get my own apartment, my own kitchen to dance in, my own reading corner with three bookcases. Money is opportunity and choices, beginning with the opportunity to pay it forward.

Idaho Christmas

We keep on repeating the same lessons until we truly learn something from them.

Real human connection is the most valuable thing on earth. Our culture is starved for it. Technology, consumerism get in the way.

Most of us don't go to church anymore, and after Amazon and Walmart there is no Main Street. Structures that bound us together don't exist.

Talked to a young woman tonight. She and her boyfriend are getting evicted from their housing share as unauthorized guests.

Both have jobs, but together they don't make enough for Portland rents or $2500 in move-in costs.

They want to buy a rundown RV and live on the street. "Even if it has mold on the roof," she said, "I just want a place of my own."

Drove to my daughter's home in Idaho for Christmas. Got there on Christmas Eve around six.

The front window looks into the office, and at the piano I see my youngest granddaughter.

She's a picture of concentration, back straight, a ribbon in her pretty hair, playing "Up on the Housetop" and "Silent Night" in a beginner's cadence.

She's so focused on her notes she doesn't see me, and I watch her from the window for both songs. Snow shrouds the fir trees in the yard.

This is the most tender memory of my life.

You think you are doing one thing or another, until you discover your real life is about something entirely different.