Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Patience and Persistence

Bread  redux

One of the bloggers I follow, Zoomie Station, recently wrote about a professor who taught her many things, but most importantly, patience and persistence. That got me thinking about how I learned what modicum of patience I possess. I would say my teacher, hands down, is my wife April. I'm not trying to butter her up, it is true and she knows it. What does that have to do with the unique loaf of bread above? Here is the back story.

During the part of our lives when we were having lots of kids April managed the household on my not-so-large salary. Short of weaving straw from gold, she could make something from nothing. One of the products she used was Bridgford frozen bread dough. It provided cheap and tasty bread to feed our gang. Recently my day job went away and I find myself with a bit of time on my hands between job searching and filling out tons of unemployment paperwork. I decided to have a shot at cutting the food budget. There, in the frozen food section I spotted the Bridgford and threw it in the basket. I took it home and began proofing it before baking. Unfortunately, I forgot about it. When I finally remembered, it had puffed up to basketball size. I was disappointed; thinking I had ruined it, I was about to chuck the dough in trash.

April said "Be patient, punch it down and it will rise back up again."
I replied, "Oh yeah, sure!"

Sure enough, it rose up albeit a little crooked. When one of the kids stopped by, she wondered what Artisan Bakery I had purchased the loaf from!

The moral to the story and the current mantra I plan to move forward with: Have patience and persistence, when something seems out of control - make the best of it. To every end there is a new beginning - I think that's from a song. Life's a picnic, enjoy!

4 comments:

Zoomie said...

Greg, I'm a career counselor with 20+ years of experience. Let me know if you'd like an experienced eye for editing your resume/cover letters/encouragement/pep talks/sources/whatever. No charge for you since you say such nice things on my blog.

Greg said...

Thank you Zoomie!

cookiecrumb said...

Such a beautiful loaf!
May you have similar luck in your job search.

Greg said...

Thank you cookiecrumb! Meanwhile I have lots of time to cook and blog.