Michigan Bakery

The outside has changed as much as the inside has in nearly a hundred years. They both have changed as much as the ovens, as much as the rolls and loaves and cakes, as much as the wire racks and glass bell jars: that is to say, not much is different.

The wet, yeasty heat I feel as I open the door, brass bells jingling and clanking happily against the screen: that, too, hasn’t changed, because, well, what can change? The baking process is much what is was in Sumerian hearths, in Egyptian bakeries, in the clay ovens of Çatal Hüyük eight thousand years ago.

So, the bread remains the same, and this shop takes on the charm, the character, of the small town it serves. Over the door, brushed by a tepid, lifeless summer breeze, a bright American flag tries to salute passers-by. The mailbox is painted to look like a loaf. On the ledge inside the plate glass window (on which is painted in gold the same hue as a summer wheat field “Michigan Bakery”), seemingly in formation, are nearly forty framed photographs of young women, young men, in uniform, eyes honest, chins jutting, scowls forced. These soldiers and marines and sailors are all dead, all from Michigan. Two frames were lined with black ribbons. I recognized the faces from the front page of the town’s newspaper.

“What’ll it be, honey?” the owner asked me, her hair limp with sweat on this mid-July day. Only a powdering of flour across her blue apron could make her appear more harried. Her daughter, brown paper bag in hand, looked on expectantly. I glanced at the rack behind her, full and hopeful as a library shelf.

“Six buttermilk rolls.” I said, thinking about dinner.

“That’s it?”

I paused. The raisin bread was tempting.

“How much for the raisin loaf?”

“Two thirty-five”; her voice inflected slightly, making it a question. Do you want it?

“Yeah, I’ll take that, too.” As quickly as I answered, the little girl stepped on a stool, retrieved the rum-colored loaf, and jabbed it into a paper bag. Deftly, and with a competent smile, she slipped in a plastic bag and a twist tie. She brushed her hair out of her eyes, which watched me closely and eagerly should I add to my order. A box fan hummed to itself in the corner.

The baker totaled the bill on a slip of paper and entered it into an ancient cash register, the numbers jumping up into a little window on top. I gave her a five-dollar bill, which she traded me for a handful of change. She smiled and turned to the back room of the bakery, from which I could feel the heat of the ovens. Shouldn’t they bake in the morning, before it got hot? Perhaps they did, but the heat, with nowhere else to go—reflected down from the stamped-tin plates on the ceiling—stayed there, waiting until midnight to dissipate.

I turned to look at the bulletin board, thick with posters, announcements, and business cards, and I looked at my watch. A snack was in order, so I opened the bag and broke off a piece of a roll. It was a still warm; what else is necessary in life? Man—at least this man—can live on bread alone. I paused; my wife wouldn’t be expecting me back with the bread anytime soon. I read the announcements: pancake breakfast, sublet available, lawn mowers tuned up and blades sharpened, musicians available for parties and weddings. Lost pet.

Next to this were photographs. This small town, fifty, seventy-five, a hundred years ago, in black and white, in sepia. Horses and phaetons, spindly black Model Ts and Model As. Lush trees and mud streets. Top hats and spats. Long-dead mayors. Skinny children and white-bearded elders watched the camera warily. There were photographs of parades with elephants; a biplane on the village green flanked by white-dressed woman in flouncy hats. A formation of doughboys, rifles at their sides, high brown leather boots and steel helmets, glaring sternly at the camera, ready to face the Hun.

A moment later, I’m outside, warm bag under my arm, half-chewed roll in my mouth. Here, outside the bakery, is where the change is obvious and the contrast can be seen. The buildings, the apartments, and roads—yes, they look much the same as they did when McKinley was president, but the differences jut out as insistently as the tiny green weeds pushing through the seams of the concrete sidewalk.

Main Street is bisected by another avenue, forming an X, a four-corner town like many others in the Midwest, still following centuries later an invisible Indian trace. Ocher bricks, on top of the cobblestones that once covered that packed-dirt path, peek here and there from thinning asphalt. I walked along, watching the old and the new shifting, combining, the way an optical illusion flits back and forth. Now you see it, now it’s gone. What was ninety years ago a dry-goods store, according to a reproduced daguerreotype on the bakery wall, is currently an outlet for a national pizza chain. Opposite, in what used to be a Woolworth’s, there stands a dollar store, a sullen teenaged clerk leaning against the front doorway, taking a break from the tacky Chinese rubbish inside. Crossing the street, I smile, she looks away, and I bite into another roll.

Chiseled into marble and set into the cornice of a brick building taking up half a block is I.O.O.F. That’s been painted over; you have to know what you’re looking for to see it. Before it was the Odd Fellow lodge, this used to be a theater.  Operas and vaudeville played here long ago. Now it’s owned by a chiropractor who is advertising additional upstairs office space for rent.

I continue down the sidewalk where empty, round iron grilles are set into the pavement every twenty feet. Close to the curb, trees used to grow here. Making up for their loss, the city has planted geraniums in terracotta pots the size and shape of garbage cans, pots the same color as the façade of what twenty years ago was the Donauer Haus German Restaurant. But it wasn’t always that. Our town was once a railhead, and while trains still grumble through daily (diesel, of course, not steam), the passengers are gone. What was once a German restaurant had been long before a twenty-room grand hotel—built just for the overnight travelers waiting to continue to Detroit or Chicago and points west—and appointed with the same elegance and detail they would have found in New York, here in the cornfields. The Donauer is now an empty hulk, looking for a renovation and a new owner. I sit on its cracked brick steps and eat.

Across from me, there is the Michigan Bakery again, and I realize I have to go back: My paper bag is half empty. I wait for the traffic to pass, and I glance at the forty portraits of the dead soldiers, still standing at attention, waiting in vain to be dismissed. The flag next to the bakery’s door still hangs loosely in the heat, and I am back where nothing changes. As regular and poignant and pungent as rolls and loaves, as soldiers, as entire city blocks and as memories sworn to be solid, there they are—the doughboys, the photographs, the flags, the bread and the icing—all the same as a dozen decades ago.

Plato was right; only the dead have seen the end of war. A month ago, in the coffee shop that was once a milliner’s, a barista told me about his brother, injured in Afghanistan, a kneecap shot away. Change a century and the merchandise, and couldn’t a hat maker, over a glass counter piled high with lace, feathers, ribbon, and felt, have told a customer about his brother’s injury in Cuba, in the Philippines? Change another decade, and the décor, and couldn’t a greased-back soda jerk mourn the death of his brother in Malmédy or Hue? Here, today, and now in the Michigan Bakery, there are fresh faces and names, but they are as dead and gone as the doughboys in the pictures on the wall. The images are different, but the tricolored bunting stays the same. Soldiers and bread, yeast cultures and patriotism, feeding and nourishing, leavening and defiling. Thanatos and eros. Unbroken and unchanging, here in the corner of a small Michigan town constantly rebuilding and renewing—though it may take a score of years for you to see.

In the back of the shop, an oven door slammed and a tray clattered on a steel counter. I opened the screen door, jangling the little bells, and left the summer sidewalk. The bakery was here waiting for me.

John Pahle teaches high school English near Ypsilanti, Michigan.  He's still trying to convince his students that, yes, people do write for fun.