monday

Tonight, I was eating a sandwich. All summer long, and now, well, now that fall has begun all fall long too, tomato sandwiches have been a key part of my diet. Tomato+mayonnaise+salt+pepper+basil between bread. Tonight, as it happened, I had some avocado. I used to include lettuce, but now its all gone to seed and chicken beaks. I use almost exclusively bread from a bakery in town; its a levain bread and I find it doesn't go stale as quickly as other breads. But, as it turns out I shopped at Whole Foods this weekend (which I know is freakishly like shopping at Wal Mart, but I mean sometimes I just like to, okay?) It was nearing the end of the day as I stared at the fresh bread selection and all that was left was sourdough. Not a loaf of wheat in sight. Well, I do like sourdough but I really am a creature of habit and I always buy wheat bread, so I went to the other side of the aisle which has the bread that comes in plastic sacks with twist ties and is sliced.

So, that is how tonight I ended up eating a tomato and avocado sandwich in between two slices of this particular wheat bread. As I quickly ingested the savory bites, I began to think about how dumb this bread was, lacking all the integrity of my regular Brickmadien loaf. And I began a fantasy letter to the makers of this bread. "Stop selling this shit. It is crap. I know you wouldn't sell it if I wouldn't buy it. Its just that it is such an awful impression of what can be so very delicious"

And then I remembered how I was actually a little happy two nights ago as I realized that I was going to have to buy bread in a plastic bag with a twist tie, each slice guaranteed to be some odd combination of spongy and dry and to stay soft longer than a loaf you could bake would ever dream of. There is something pleasing about the slices, and I don't think its just the memory of childhood sandwiches. The uniformity of the slices , in both size and width, the guarantee that both pieces of your bread will be the same size. I am reasonably skilled with a sharp knife, and if the bread is very fresh or very dry, I can almost nail two slices of very similar width. Though, its more common that I end up with uneven slice which when combined with the oval shape of my regular bread means I almost never get to eat a symmetrical sandwich. So, I wasn't so angry at the company anymore, I was just thinking about how when it was first marketed, these bags of bread with about twelve identical slices in them, how exiting that must have been for sandwich makers everywhere. How novel! How modern! How fun! How easy it would have been not to notice that the bread of the sandwich you just ate was uniform and consistent but paled in comparison to the taste of its predecessor. And then a new thought began to dawn on me, yes something was coming together, parts of my culture re-assembling themselves, yes, it was true, I could now claim I understood what it meant to be labeled "the greatest thing since sliced bread."

Then I made another sandwich.