Bagelling in California

Real bagels are boiled, then baked. Aficionados will tell you that any round bread which hasn't been boiled first, is merely a roll with a hole and not the real thing.
For the past month I worked part-time at Barton's Bagels, a popular, locally owned shop in my hometown of San Anselmo, California. As counter staff, I made bagel sandwiches and bagged up dozens for our devoted customers. I was shown the ropes by Maria, a Latina who has been there four years. What is the perfect amount of cream cheese to spread on a toasted bagel? Maria succinctly told me, "Not too much, not too little."

So why you might ask, was someone with two degrees working in a bagel shop? The answer is simply, To Write. I've been working on a novel on and off for about three years and to be honest it's mostly been "off". Spending time with my fictional characters gives me great pleasure, yet when I lived in London I found it difficult to make the time for them. I felt guilty and reasoned that if I was really dedicated I would have risen at dawn to pound the keyboard for a few hours before work. Perhaps I wasn't that serious after all.

Last summer while volunteering on an organic fruit farm in Japan, I experienced a rush of creative energy. My body ached but my mind was pulsing with ideas for stories. I used much of my free time on the farm to write. I had a revelation - What if the problem back in London wasn't my lack of dedication, but rather an incompatibility between my job and writing for myself? I loved working in book publishing, liaising with our authors, writing briefs and crafting back cover blurbs. It was rewarding in part because it was mentally demanding. But at the end of the day I liked to go out for a drink with a friend or cook dinner listening to BBC7. The last thing I wanted to do after eight hours in front of a computer was to come home and do more of the same.

My thought was this: If I want to work seriously on my novel, I need to have a less serious job. I wanted something lively and social which got me away from my desk and interacting with people. I wanted to make money using a totally different part of my brain. I found the answer at Barton's Bagels, where I joked with the customers and ate as many delicious bagels as I could manage. Single again and broke after my long adventures in Asia, my wonderful parents invited me to live with them rent-free which enabled me to get my bank balance back in check, while only working three days a week. Additionally, as I worked 6:30am-2:30pm, I had the whole afternoon and evening to write. I even started dating for the first time in my life which was a lot of fun.

Bagels are an excellent but wholly unpretentious food. Bagels are a great equalizer, being innocent of human boundaries of class, race and age. I served business executives with hands-free devices perched on one ear and manual laborers with warm smiles and grubby palms. My customers included suburban dads with young children and yummy mummies with babies. Kids even came in on their own. Seven year-olds popped in for sesame toasted with butter or blueberry not toasted with cream cheese on their way to school. During the Lunch Rush, hungry teenagers lined up all the way to the door, asking for bagels with pesto and tomato, breakfast bagels and Kosher Polish bagel dogs.

Maria bantered with the Hispanic customers in Spanish. An old Jewish couple visiting from the East Coast, effusively praised our wares. "We didn't know you could get such good bagels in California," they said. A cattle rancher with a two mile long driveway way out in West Marin, snatched up four dozen day-olds. "I've got two freezers so why not?" She told me. "My husband asks me, 'Where do these bagels keep coming from?'" Particularly memorable was the large, African-American preacher who held my hands across the counter and said a prayer to God on behalf of me and my novel.

My buzzing mind kept looking for themes in the orders and remarkably I did appear to identify some curious trends. For example, one gray drizzly day, customers kept asking for hot chocolate and we sold out of both our chocolate and cinnamon sugar bagels. It seems people crave sweet comfort food when it's wet outside. Other trends were harder to put a finger on. One day customers kept asking for change and bagels with “just a little bit of butter” or lite cream cheese. It was as though everyone was taking the bus and feeling fat. Some shifts we'd have a run on salt bagels or lox sandwiches. Particularly perplexing was when a customer would leave the shop with something unusual and the very next person would order the same thing. It was as though the desire for a jalapeño bagel with garlic chive cream cheese was still hanging in the air.

I've said my goodbyes to Maria and Barton because I'm moving on again. Incredibly, while in California I met an amazing man named Chris and we're moving to Washington, D.C. together. I'm fortunate in that I'm at a place in my life where I have no commitments or even furniture. He was offered a job out there, we want to continue to explore this new relationship and I can of course write my novel anywhere, so I am going with him. This move is wild and sudden but it feels so right. I currently plan to live there for the next two months, after which I have a flight back to London. If all continues to go well, my trip to England will only be a visit.

My bags are packed and I am saying my goodbyes to sunny mild winter and my friends and family, all of whom are very excited for me and supportive of my move. Monday Chris and I fly to a new city and my adventure continues. I hope D.C. has delicious bagels.

- Oakland, California