November 2002, evening

My father calls from his home in South Carolina. I’m in California. He was born Alfred and later changed his name to Alan. His friends call him Flip.

“Sonny,” he says.

“Hey, Poppala.”

“How you?”

My father has a PhD in history. Once he wrote plays. But as far as I know he’s unaware there is a verb missing from this sentence.

“Surviving,” I say.

“What are you doing in June?”

“I have no idea what I’m doing an hour from now.”

“Don’t be a wiseacre.”

I’m at my computer. I search dictionary.com for wiseacre. Words, writing, politics, food—these are safe ground for us.

“Slang, derived from the Middle Dutch word for soothsayer,” I report, attempting to divert him from whatever bizarre proposal he has in mind. The tactic fails.

“How about you and me take a bread making class at the French Culinary Institute in New York?” he says.

“In June. That’s seven months away.”

“Right.”

“I didn’t know you were interested in bread.”

“What’s not to be interested?”

My parents divorced when I was five. I lived with my mother in New York. Her idea of dinner was two-day old spaghetti with a dollop of cold Campbell’s tomato soup. She also liked raw t-bone with green mint jelly. Flip, by contrast, has always been passionate about what he puts in his mouth. But he wasn’t around to cook when I was growing up, so I lived on sugary breakfast cereal and bagels piled with deli meats and boxed chicken potpies.

I moved to Northern California in the late eighties and quickly fell for overpriced kitchen gadgets and cooking magazines and bags of Indian spices labeled in Hindi. I have learned to blanch string beans and to use a sushi knife and to brown a roux in a copper saucier.

A few months before my dad’s call I’d started baking.

Flip and I often talk about cooking. But he never mentioned wanting to get into bread.

“Check out the website,” he says. “The school is downtown. We’ll stuff ourselves with pastrami and pickles.” I can hear him salivating. I haven’t heard my father so enthusiastic about anything in a long time.

I hang up and look around the website.

Braided, sunny yellow challah bread . . . foccaccia, fragrant with herbs . . . crusty baguettes . . . and dense, chewy peasant loaves. There's nothing more tantalizing than home-baked breads. And in just one week at The FCI, you can discover the secrets of baking beautiful and distinctive artisan breads.

I must admit, it sounds pretty appetizing.

As your distinguished Chef-Instructor works side-by-side with you, you will learn how to combine flour, water, yeast, salt and other ingredients to create a wide range of tastes and textures. You will discover how to adjust for variations in milling, the humidity of the kitchen, and even the weather. You will mix, ferment, punch down, shape, score, finish and bake your dough into delectable loaves. And your sense of accomplishment will grow.

I call back.

“You really want to do this?” I say.

“I already sent off a check. They give you a uniform and one of those paper hats.”

“I’ll go, but I'm not wearing the hat.”

He ignores me.

“It’ll be good for us. We haven’t done something like this for a long time.”

Actually, we’ve never done anything remotely like this. A few years after Flip left my mother he moved to Clemson, a small college town in South Carolina. I haven’t spent more than a day or two alone with him in thirty years.

“The date again?” I say.

“June 5th.”

“Of 2003?”

“Yes.”

“What year is it now?”

“Dylan–”

“All right, relax. I’m writing it down. Baking with Pop, New York, June 5.”