Dating the Bread-Delivery Man

             

            The first of two older guys I’ve dated is a bread–delivery man in southern Vermont. We met five summers ago on one of his deliveries to the local general store in Putney, where I was working on a small farm. As I exited lugging a sack of feed, he pulled up to the side of the store in his “bread van.” I stopped to watch a lean, blonde man in a moth-eaten t-shirt hop out and dash to the back of the van.  He opened the door –– revealing loaves of rye and a tray of strawberry muffins. The muffins looked good; the green beans I’d harvested and snacked on that morning weren’t doing it. (Okay, so with the definition in his tanned forearms as he lifted the first tray, the delivery–man looked good too. But that’s beside the point). Noon and, as usual, I had no sunglasses so I used one hand as a visor and squinted; I didn’t know I was about to make a man in his thirties think I was flirting with him.

            “Hey,” I called. 

            He turned his head. 

            “Can I have one?”

            He said nothing but didn’t move, so I came closer.  Gaze slanted down because of the sun, I saw he wore those velcro “Teva” sandals popular in the late nineties.

            Standing in the shade of the back of his truck, I could now look at the man without squinting. But, since he was wearing sunglasses, I couldn’t tell that he was born when Gerald Ford was still president.  Only the eyes can betray the “boy” or “man” status of a guy like him –– young enough to hop and dash but old enough to wear Tevas and have the kind of sun–worn skin mosquitoes don’t bite. (Later, I’d learn that he lives in a yurt in backwoods New Hampshire, cycles hard when he isn’t baking or delivering bread, eats mostly local and organic foods, ignores the government’s antics, and has no children; of course he looks twenty-five).

            “I can’t give you a whole muffin,” he said and winked. “But we can split one.”

            Defying what every mother teaches her daughter about not approaching or eating food out of a stranger’s van, I accepted half a strawberry muffin.

            He gestured at my feed sack with his chin and, mouth full, said,  “So what are you doing with that sack?”

            “I work on the farm up the hill,” I said with my mouth full too. (You know you’ve found a kindred spirit when you meet and can talk to each other with your mouths full right away). But, suddenly, I stopped chewing. “What time is it?”

            “No watch,” he said, holding up his wrist.

            “I should get going,” I said, picking up my sack of feed.

            “Just using me for my muffins then?” He said.

             Smiling: “I guess you could say that.” 

             He laughed, shook his head, and picked up the tray of strawberry muffins again.

            “Hey,” I called, as he walked up to the steps to the general store.

            He turned his head.

            “Thanks.”

*       *       *

            

            The next day, the bread-delivery man cycled up to the farm in search of me. I was napping, so he left a note with the farmer: Dear Muffin Girl, I’m the guy who shared a muffin with you the other day outside the general store. Do you like cheese? I have no cell phone, but here’s my e-mail. His romantic gesture made me giddy from the tips of my toes to my eyebrows. I was certain that we would share many more muffins. As I sat down to write the bread-delivery man that I do indeed like cheese, what I wasn’t certain of and what didn’t even cross my mind is that we were both nuts.

*         *         *

           

            The best part of dating the bread-delivery man for the next month was that, just to deliver me baked goods, he’d bike miles uphill from where he lived in New Hampshire close to the Vermont border. (He didn’t have access to the bakery’s “bread van” when he wasn’t on the clock). Sometimes he brought cheese too –– made from the milk of his own cows.

            In the end, it was he himself and not his eyes who told me his age. When he’d taken off his sunglasses for the first time, I’d thought he was born around the closing of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. But I learned otherwise the afternoon we sat by the pond sharing a loaf of cranberry walnut bread. He might have been outlining his plan to bike to Alaska. But, while doing the kind of snacking where half the snack gets in your mouth and the other half everywhere else, I wasn’t really listening until I heard him say:

            “But I’m thirty-two, so we’ll see how my back holds out.” 

             I was twenty-one. My back was fine. His back was out? What? But also whatever. Just like I’d later reason that it was acceptable to date an eighteen-year–old because he had a beard and looked older, I reasoned that it was okay to date this man because he could hop and dash and barely had crows’ feet. Plus, he brought me baked goods and lived in a yurt (way cool). Did I mention that he brought me cheese too?

*        *        *

            The worst part about dating the bread–delivery man was that he sometimes wore a cape made of fencing, which he stole from the farm.  Just kidding. Not about the cape, but about the cape being the worst part.  The worst was how, after only three weeks of walks around the farm and kissing in the back of his bread–van, he said he was interested in staying together in the fall.

            “You’re pretty neat, and I don’t want to lose track of you,” he said.

            But I wanted him to lose track of me; he was more than a decade older, and I was moving to Pennsylvania to live by a duck pond and finish school. Plus his fingernails were longer than mine, and, suddenly, the cape was unsettling. I panicked; if I broke it off, would he still cycle across borders to find me –– baked goods in his backpack and cape blowing in the wind?

             So I hid in the pig barn when he came to deliver my goods for what he didn’t know would be the last time. He left no note.

                                                            *         *        *

            One year later, while sitting in an empty bathtub in Pennsylvania troubled over some guy or another, I called his bakery.

            “It’s the muffin girl,” I said when he answered. 

            Silence.

            “I’m sorry.”

            Still silence.

            “Listen,” I said. “I don’t want to use you for your muffins, okay? I think you’re pretty neat, and I want to be your friend.”

            And we were and still are.

            One summer, I visited him with the eighteen–year–old boyfriend, and the three of us broke into an abandoned Christmas amusement park called “Santa’s Land.” I have a scar on my wrist from jumping the fence.

            Wading through the muck of all the dating that followed my breakup with the eighteen-year-old, I sometimes wondered if my life would have been happier, simpler, and more pure if I’d decided to continue dating the bread-delivery man. But then I wouldn’t have had as much to write about I guess, and I wouldn’t be dating a cowboy/ soldier/ rancher/ pilot (this is all one person). And now, with the same joy and ease as I shared a strawberry muffin with him years ago, I will share this story with my bread-man.  He will correct me on certain details (most likely about the cape). He will also tell me to omit one or two things and, in their places, write about his personal cycling goals.