Last weekend at One Writer's Place, a student friend of mine and I had an experience worthy of fiction - all in the diehard quest for good bakery.
I'm going to commit a writing sin (one for which I might chastise my students) and describe One Writer's Place before I relate the story. This is for the sake of you who might come across this blog in an accident on Google and who don't know the name of Jacquelyn Mitchard from the name of a good brand of packing tape.
One Writer's Place is a place and idea.
The idea lives inside a modest Cape Cod home that we found and furnished, mostly with used things we bought on Craigslist or which were donated to us when we explained their purpose. My immensely generous and brilliant pal -- the artist and colorist Cristina Reverdy (whose paintings now are on display at the Cultural Center of Cape Cod and also on www.yellowhousestudio.com) enlivened the house and made it beautiful, right up to the mermaids on the upstairs bedroom wall.
She did this for the cost of the paint, for the love of art and for love of the mission.
The mission is to give writers of all kind (from song to screenplay) and small-form visual artists (such as Susan Reading, who makes amazing fabric jewelry, while also hosting the renowned Novel Evening Book Club) a place to be who they are. The photography of my best friend's son, Christopher LeClaire, hangs on the walls (see Chris' beautiful photos on Facebook).
There is no jury to judge the merits of the work or the idea.
There is no qualification beyond the wish and the will to do something creative, especially when that wish and will has to be squeezed like toothpaste out of a life packed tight with multi-colored and conflicting responsibilities. It's possible to stay at One Writer's Place just for a week - which isn't possible at most real writer's residences, which are intensely competitive and should be. They come with a great deal of prestige and terrific perks, which this place does not (although the mattresses ARE new and very, very comfortable). But fifteen years ago, when I was a newly widowed mom -- facing her forties with no money but three young sons who needed it, no hope but the need to shape a dream from it and no time but the urgent need to make some of it from mist so that I could find out who I might try to be for the forty-odd years or more of life I had leftover.
To come here as a resident, you have to be able to drive a car, ride a plane or sit on a bus, pay a cleaning fee and feed yourself.
That's it.
You have to provide references, but they need be references not to your talent but to your character. In other words, don't make this your first stop after you do five years for arson. (By the way, whoever it was took the three baby turtles that used to sit on my window sill with the mama? Hey, I don't know who you are but it's on your karma, not mine.)
The whole thing's based on trust.
So far - except for those turtles, which you can return, no questions asked - it's worked out.
A writer can also take classes here (I don't know how to make jewelry). I only know how to write, some days better than others. That costs more but includes gourmet meals and very nice mattresses as well as a few words to the wise and some pretty difficult work.
The day of the do-or-die bakery run was one of the days that I was in the midst of teaching two back-to-back seminars scheduled the previous fall.
I mention that this workshop and retreat had been scheduled the previous fall because, last fall, neither I nor my co-worker, Pamela, realized that the week I would be here was the week of my younger children's spring break as well as the celebration of Easter and Passover.
Huge guilt (appropriate to the season), huge secular grief (my youngest sons are already three and five; how many more times can the Easter Bunny come?). Huge infliction of my angst on my husband and mother-in-law.
At least, Pamela explained to me, her gaze shining tears nearly ready to spill, the weather would be beautiful -- spring by the ocean, the daffodils in bloom, the birds at work on their nests.
And it was the kind of weekend that accounts for the high rate of alcoholism among people who yearly endure the harsh winters on the North Atlantic for the sake of the short season of forgiveness. On Friday, it was bone-cold. Saturday, it rained for twenty hours straight.
I couldn't color the bunny eggs, so I decided I must have hot cross buns for my students.
Because one of my students, Candace Hammond, is a feature writer for the Cape Cod Times, and because she - I think it was she - had written an article that glowed about one bakery's legendary Hot Cross buns (the kind in the nursery rhyme that are one-a-penny, two-a-penny but cost a little more, though not very much more, now).
As a result, the bakery got orders for about 5,000 Hot Cross buns, buns that the owner had to bake, cross and cut by hand. And although they stopped taking orders on Friday, on Saturday, we found out through a covert phone tip, that more hot cross buns might be forthcoming on a first-come, first-served basis sometime before noon.
Candy and I set out at the appointed hour (11 a.m.) and arrived at the bakery.
It is in Chatham, Massachusetts, and it is called Marion's Pies. (Marion's Pies does feature uncommonly good pies despite the Sweeney-Todd like sign next to the door that reads, 'Good children are welcome. The others will be made into pies.' This is a legacy from the founder and from my few encounters with her, one of the only human beings on earth who ever scared me on sight, was not entirely out of line with the prevailing philosophy at the time.)
Although the line at the door was only six persons long, cars filled the parking lot and lined the sides of the street for a block either way as though there was an estate sale in progress hosted by someone who wanted high prices for the Tupperware but was going to throw the antiques away after the final gavel dropped.
The new owner of the bakery - whom I'll refer to as Not-Marion -- was conducting the run on the bun-bank with the aplomb of a Brooklyn police officer. Even from outside, we could hear her saying, "Look, stand back! If you've got a number, we'll get to you. If you don't, we'll get to you. We have chicken pies but not with vegetables. We'll have those later," Not-Marion said.
Mildly, the gent in front of me remarked that it was amazing what a person would go through to get out of making a pie.
"We are here for the hot cross buns," I told him.
"Fat chance," said he.
Indeed, Candy and I had remarked to each other that we were standing outside in line, wearing winter coats and sheltering under an umbrella the size of a parasol for $8 worth of flour and icing, it did not seem right or anything except cowardly to turn back at that point. By 11:30 a.m., we had advanced in the line and could see twenty people inside standing in front of the counter - a space about four by twelve feet - in ranks three deep.
On the porch under the awning stood a truly terrifying Easter bunny.
Since I have been an Easter bunny (I was a blue bunny in a mall and it was one of the things an editor can make a person do who's desperate to keep her first daily newspaper job) I knew what rigors of heat and itch the person inside the bunny must be feeling; but truly, the aspect was not reminiscent of Harvey but more of Stephen King.
That bunny was six feet tall and had eyes like tar pits.
"It's going better than Santa," one father remarked, as he coaxed his three-year-old closer (why do we do this to children?) until the child looked into those soul-dead bunny-head eyes and screamed.
"I have coulrophobia," Candy told me, sotto voce.
"What is that?" I asked, watching the little kid run for the safety of the car with his father in hot pursuit - while the bunny, who was actually a nice young guy passing out eggs with jelly beans and bottles of soap bubbles - looked crestfallen in a creepy, monstrous but rather fetching way.
"It's fear of clowns," Candy said.
Later, I looked it up and found that coulrophobia actually is an EXAGGERATED fear of clowns - which presumes that everyone has a fear of clowns that pertains to some degree and I certainly do. (As does Stephen King. Read the novel 'It,' or if you have really truly exaggerated coultrophobia, don't.) Mine stems from an early-childhood viewing of the Disney movie 'Dumbo,' in which the clowns were, as some are, in fact, vicious jerks who made fun of the poor orphaned baby Dumbo as well as pretending to smack a man dressed up as a human baby with a bat and some other things that might have been wildly hysterical if you were a sociopath.
I love to sing the song 'Baby Mine,' to my children but cannot sing it without breaking into sobs, and wonder, re 'Dumbo,' why do we inflict these things on children? And what do we think about the children who do find the clown scene funny? Do we make sure they don't like meat?
A woman who had taken refuge under the awning, next to me and the bunny, who contritely held out a jelly-bean egg to me which I accepted on behalf of my abandoned children, told me that her 28-year-old son had attempted to conquer his toddler's fear of Santa Claus (this is called "Santaphobia"). "He let my grandson watch him put on the coat and the boots and the hat and the beard and he kept telling him, see? It's only Daddy. But the minute my son went into the bathroom and came out again with the costume on, the baby got hysterical."
Why do we do these things to our children?
Betimes, Candy and I got into the building and asked the question of the hour. "Do you have any more hot cross buns?"
Hysterical laughter. The people behind the counter became red-eyed and wolfen. As one, they cried, "I never want to see another hot-cross bun!"
"Five thousand hot cross buns, and then another few hundred today!" called another.
I didn't dare speak again. In fact, I didn't want to know the answer. It has been so long and I had come so far. I had abandoned my other students (not to mention my children who would need therapy) on this fool's errand for reasons I quite likely don't entirely understand myself.
"But have you got any hot-cross buns?" Candy asked boldly. Candy is tall and blond and slim and soon will have arms like Michelle Obama because she's getting personal training free to write a feature story on how to get arms like Michelle Obama.
"Well, yes, we do," one of the women behind the counter replied. "We're just sick of them, is all."
The presumed owner, meanwhile, was engaged in battle with a determined woman of some eighty years - the kind of rugged Yankee I will never be and who is made only from genetic material found on the Eastern seaboard - who had ordered a shepherd's pie WITH vegetables. She was irate to have come out in weather so foul she could barely pilot her Volvo for being unable to see through the windshield to get it and was now being told to wait or come back later.
"I'll tell you one thing! Marion wouldn't have put up with this!" said Not-Marion and many of us nodded at each other in the universal gesture that says, yea, verily. By then, one man had abandoned his place in line after learning that a fellow who had just left with TWO DOZEN hot-cross buns had also smashed in the front of the car of the guy still waiting in line.
And it was at that moment that the thing happened that provided the lyric passage in the whole encounter.
"You can pay your money and go down there and actually get your pie," said one of the women behind the counter. "Or you can stand here and argue with me." All of us held our collective breath. "In face, I live nearby you. And I'll deliver it to you myself," she went on. And everybody looked at his or her neighbor and thought how glad we were to be in this downpour at this time and place to witness a simple act of pure human generosity from a woman exhausted beyond the ability to cut through dough. "It's a holy weekend in everyone's tradition, no matter what you are," she said to the crowd. "And darn it! Let's BE NICE!"

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