Bread Alone

by Judi Hendricks

When we’re face-to-face with the unthinkable, why do we try to defend ourselves with trivia?

In the movies, when it’s time for The Bad Thing to happen, the music changes. When the homesteaders have got all the crops in the barn and they’re having the harvest hoedown and everybody’s dancing and having fun, then the menacing cello tremolo lets you know that the cattle baron’s henchmen are about to show up and gun down a few innocent bystanders. I’ve always thought it extremely unfair that real life doesn’t come with that sort of sound track. Not that it would change anything, but advance notice would be nice.

bread may not always turn out the way you intend it to, but it always turns out.

the smell of baking bread is a proven antidote to depression.

“We never expect, but we always hope. That’s the bitch of it.

One of the big advantages of living alone. You can talk to inanimate objects without getting a lot of weird looks.

As you get older, you forget how nice it can be to hear a story instead of reading it. It calls up all these primal race memories of storytellers squatting around a campfire in the jungle darkness.

“Planning holds you together because it’s fun—mostly imagination and anticipation. Then when you actually have to start working, reality sets in.

In composition class, they tell you that a cliché is a disaster. The literary equivalent of farting at the dinner table or walking out of the bathroom with the hem of your dress tucked neatly into your panty hose. What they don’t tell you is that clichés have become clichéd because they’re true. Because they’re exactly how most people act.

Which just proves that a true friend is somebody who insists on believing the best of you, even when faced with irrefutable evidence to the contrary.