The City Bakery Closes, an Era Ends

Two days ago I found out that The City Bakery is closing today. I cried. Then I felt stupid for crying and I wondered why I was being so sentimental. Yes, there was a time when I ate there almost every day, but in over a year, I don't think I've gone more than once.

So I planned to go for lunch today, for one last taste, but I didn't go. Although I'll undoubtedly miss City's cornbread salad (for both the flavor and the comedy of calling what is essentially a bowl of dressed croutons a "salad"), this feeling I have isn't really about the food.

Only very recently, I realized that I have subconsciously organized my entire life according to specific foods/flavors/restaurants that I associate with each distinct period. I have begun to refer to this subconscious organization as my Autobiography in Food. And much in the same way that my childhood was Rosa Rita beans (see Deep Fried Twinkie), the summer of 2006, my first summer with David, was The City Bakery.

That was the summer before I started UCLA. Neither one of us had jobs, so every day, we'd grab lunch at City, and picnic on the beach and then swim in the ocean. Sooner or later, I'd get taken out by a wave and drag myself back to the berm and collapse on my towel. I would lie there catching my breath and then when I had he would ask me about my plans for the future and I would talk about them with exhausting excitement until we both fell asleep. During those days at the beach, he taught me what it meant to be present, and what it meant to love my body. I stopped associating eating with shame and my weight finally equalized. That summer, for the what might have been the first time in my whole life, I was confident that every decision I'd ever made was right because each one had led me to that spot on the sand, where I was always just beginning.

In my Autobiography in Food, all the parts of that summer, everything I learned, and that truly perfect happiness of having direction and purpose, occupy the same space as The City. In my Autobiography in Food, they are tied inextricably. And because the end of one era and the beginning of another is often only distinguishable in retrospect, when I heard that The City is closing, I was finally awakened to the fact that that time, when I knew where I was going and it was exactly where I wanted to be, is most definitively over.

Today, I don't know what I'm doing or what's going to happen. I talk about my future reluctantly, and with hesitation. I know there will be other good places, like there will be other happy summers and other nurturing lovers. But today, losing the bakery is like losing a part of myself; it's like losing one of the best parts when I need it the most.