The Baker's Table
~This article first appeared in the Leader-Vindicator newspaper. ~
Photo credit: Wild Rose Bread Company
The Brewers arrived first.
My wife and I walked into the warm shop on a freezing late March evening to the scene of four people chatting under warm light and surrounded by food on every surface.
Our addition made six in attendance, so we greeted and chatted and shuffled around each other to get settled. The Baker showed us her kitchen, a space made famous by social media. While we looked and soaked in the residual oven warmth, the Dairy Farmers arrived, making eight.
So again we shuffled out to the main floor and greeted and chatted and settled. And then the Baker announced: “EAT!”
Cheese. Green salad. Roasted grapes on heavy whipped cream – I will dream of this perhaps for decades - and stuffed olives. Small chocolates and big vines of roasted cherry tomatoes crispy with char. Chickpea medley. Warm oils with spices and bread – of course, bread; we were in the bread capital of our region. The Brewers uncapped beer. We milled around to gather food and joked with each other and mumbled to ourselves how to most effectively achieve a sampling of everything on display.
And then we sat at an oval table: Four couples representing a Microbakery, a Microdairy, a Microbrewery, and a family beef farm. Thank you, Lord, for bringing us to this moment.
The conversation picked up communally exactly where it had left off in each individual mind prior to our gathering. Each couple pursues a different passion, yet we’re all thinking the same thoughts, so nobody needed to explain themselves. These thoughts, we agreed, are exclusive to the entrepreneurial culture and cannot cross the conversational barrier that surrounds a nine-to-five worldview. This evening, thanks to the Baker, we could verbalize.
Each couple consisted of a dreamer who chases ideas and an anchor who remembers stability. The dreamer sidesteps current barriers to progress and chatters (without ceasing) about elaborate ideas of monumental effort while the anchor gently reminds that there are dishes to be done and the kids need to eat something. Our personality balance was so uniform around the table that I wonder if it is just by chance or if opposites truly do attract.
Collective success, we agreed, was largely a result of starting something without enough knowledge of the hardships, losing control of the beast, and surviving the horrendous thrashing that occurs when balancing production, customers, and some semblance of professionalism. Nobody could say with any certainty how they got to their current position, and nobody really knew with any certainty what the next step is. Whatever success is, it doesn’t feel like it.
Everyone shared customer stories, which are at the same time so horrific and so hilarious that we were laughing without breath and mourning the fate of humanity simultaneously.
I was thrilled to discover I’m not the only person who begins every email reply with “I’m sorry for the slow response…” Turns out, that could be the motto of microbusiness. A technology based culture is accustomed to 24/7 on demand service. But when the kids are pooping too much or not at all, and machines break, and animals die, and the neighbors get weird, and the tasks take forever, and inventory runs out (again), and nobody has eaten, you realize, possibly for days, and you delay another date with your spouse, and tensions run high, and hope hits a low point, and there’s still more to do, a micro business has, on average, about fifteen minutes per seven days to respond to whatever requests might be coming in, most of which have nothing to do with the actual business in question. And so we delay, feel guilty, and begin, “I’m sorry…”
Oh, but the light; there is so much good in the world. When we turned our dialogue from the afflictive to the affirmative, conversation actually stopped for a beat in reverence for the people who believe in us. For a fleeting instant we were joined around the table by that special army of people who make it all worth it and who got us to where we are against all odds. One good customer can neutralize thirty annoyances, and there are so many people out there who cheer us on; enough good people, in fact, that eight of us could sit together and have businesses to talk about. I guarantee that gratitude is the largest production unit from the kitchen, from the brewery, from the milking parlor, and from the cowpen. A pity indeed that it’s invisible.
The Baker’s Table. We got to sit at The Baker’s Table with wildly interesting people and talk and listen and eat. This is the kind of thing written about in best-selling books and broadcast on prime time television shows. Yet it happened here, because the Baker had an idea and was willing to withstand extraordinary personal sacrifice in order to create an evening for the rest of us. If you read this, Baker, thank you.
We should get together again, we agreed. We made promises to set a date as we stepped back out in the cold. It would be worth it even if…you know…even if we just order a dang pizza.