Sourdough

by Robin Sloan

Here’s a thing I believe about people my age: we are the children of Hogwarts, and more than anything, we just want to be sorted.

After my success in college, my neat acquisition of a job, and my precocious home purchase, I had considered myself a child of whom parents and grandparents could be proud. But it struck me then: the starkness of my apartment. Of my life. Grandma Lois, if she could have come to visit—and for the first time ever, I felt a pang, a deep wish that she could visit me here, just her alone, alive—if she could have, and if she had seen me here in San Francisco, she wouldn’t have been proud of me. She would have been sad, and maybe a little bit worried. I needed a more interesting life. I could start by learning something. I could start with the starter.

Baking, by contrast, was solving the same problem over and over again, because every time, the solution was consumed. I mean, really: chewed and digested. Thus, the problem was ongoing. Thus, the problem was perhaps the point.

It was a rejection of ambition; a blueprint for her small, perfect, human-scale restaurant—a safe space set apart from the scrum of the world.