"Wholesome" Home Made Bread

I don't know why I feel like blogging about this. If you don't like girly, feeling stuff, you might want to skip this one. Every time I bake bread I can't help but to think about an old friend of mine.

This was kind of an odd friendship. I don't know how or why, but somehow this guy and his friends started sitting with me and my friends at lunch in high school. We didn't really run with the same crowd at all. Only we happened to have the same lunch period, and I guess some of his lunch time friends were friends with my friends. Anyway, as I remember it he sought me out for friendship. He started calling me everyday after school. It was like clockwork, I could always count on his phone call. We would talk for at least an hour, sometimes two everyday after school. From his appearance, you'd assume he was a bad boy, but he was really a great guy on the inside. He kind of reminded me of Steven Tyler (Aerosmith) in looks. Anyway, why did we become friends? I don't know. I think he liked me in the crush sort of sense, and I'd have to say that the feeling was mutual. However, neither of us ever made any move in that direction. We were only ever just good friends. He seemed to see something in me that was better than I was at the time. I remember him telling me that he could see me someday in the future baking bread and playing piano. He said he just pictured a husband coming home from work and there I'd be playing the piano with a "beautiful loaf of bread." (He also liked the word "wholesome." Why, I don't know, he said it just sounded cool.) I told him he was silly because at the time, I neither knew how to bake bread or play the piano. The funny thing now is that piano has become my absolute favorite hobby. (He had nothing to do with it. I just fell in love with the instrument.) I remember feeling like I should try to do some missionary work with him, but I was a chicken, and never plucked up the courage to try.

Anyway, about a year after he graduated high school, he was murdered. It was rather horrible. I wanted to go to his funeral, but I didn't. I kind of felt like an outsider. He was the only person in his circle that I really knew. I wasn't friends with his close friends, and I'd never met his family, so I just felt like I would have been out of place. Anyway, I can't make bread or hear the song "Brown Eyed Girl" (That song seemed to play over and over again on the juke box at in the high school cafeteria. He's why it's on my play list.) without thinking about, and fondly remembering my friend who turned out to be right about me.