Born to Bake

My mother never tires of telling the story of how, when I was five, she gave me a paper plate and asked me to draw a picture of what I wanted to be when I grew up. I went to work on a portrait of my grown-up self wearing a chef’s coat, maybe in tribute to the Swedish Chef on The Muppet Show. Or perhaps the smell of bread at the Wonder Bread factory that I visited on a class trip had burrowed into my subconscious. (Or, in the way that dreams work, maybe it was a mash-up of the two.) In addition to the white coat, on my head I wore a tall chef’s toque, and in my hand I held a wad of dough. “Zach Dog,” I wrote by way of a caption. In later years, I wondered what that scene had to do with a dog, until one day my mother cleared up the mystery. “You were just learning to write, and D-O-G was your first-grader’s way of spelling ‘dough,’” she told me. “You wanted to be a baker!” If only I had listened to my inner child, I might have saved years of trying to find myself and been a baker from the get-go.