Робин Слоун: Sourdough

Later, back in Southfield, I cleaned up my act somewhat. Before I was the number one eater at Clement Street Soup and Sourdough, I was a very familiar face at the Whole Foods salad bar on West 10 Mile. My creations tended to go heavy on croutons. One day, a single chicken tender found its way into the nest of lettuce. It was delicious. So closed a brief and disastrous era.

In San Francisco, I switched to Slurry, and my refrigerator looked like something out of a sci-fi movie, tight rows of shimmery Tetra Paks replenished every two weeks.

This is all to say: I’d never baked bread in my life.

THE LOIS CLUB

I CLIMBED THE HILL behind the hospital to attend a meeting of the Lois Club.

Do other names boast affiliated clubs? Certainly there is no Rachel Club. Maybe Persephones have a club. We Loises do. It’s real! There are chapters scattered around the country.

My grandmother Lois LaMotte was a member of the first-ever Lois Club, in Milwaukee. Later, after she moved to Detroit to be closer to her daughter and eponymous baby granddaughter, she met another Lois waiting in line at Meijer and together they formed the Metro Detroit chapter. They advertised it in the newspaper! I attended an early meeting as an infant; there is a photo I still possess, scanned and saved, that shows a group of six white-haired women all named Lois gathered around a swaddled baby burrito who is also named Lois, their faces frozen in coos of delight. Little burrito Lois is crying.

My only conscious memory of that Lois Club comes from when I must have been nine or ten years old. I can remember the dry floral scent of someone else’s grandma’s house, and what then seemed to me—a shy kid—an overwhelming cacophony of laughter; unrelenting cackles. I retreated into an adjoining room, where I played my Nintendo DS. One of the Loises—I have no idea which one—stumbled upon me there, and for at least ten minutes she watched the shimmering screen silently over my shoulder.

Grandma Lois died when I was twelve, and throughout my teens my mother would gently inquire, once every couple of years, if I ever thought about attending a meeting of the Lois Club. I did not. Without Grandma Lois? Unthinkable. In any case, I’m not sure the Detroit chapter lasted long without her.

So, my first thought upon arriving in California was not: I ought to look up the local Lois Club . Nor was it my second thought, or my three hundred and fifty-third. It was my mother who sent me the link. “I thought of Gram’s club the other day,” she wrote, “and look what I found!” It was a page on the Lois Club website advertising the existence of a San Francisco Bay Area chapter.

I might not have been so eager to meet the Loises if I hadn’t been spending all day with the cold-eyed wraiths at General Dexterity. By comparison, hanging out with a bunch of middle-aged ladies with the same name as me sounded pretty alluring.

The meeting was held in a dark-shingled house in a twisty neighborhood reached by a hidden staircase that wandered up from Parnassus Avenue. I hiked from the Farnsworth Steps to Edgewood Avenue to a cul-de-sac that backed up against the eucalyptus forest that crowned the hill.

A handwritten sign on the door read: Welcome, Lois!

It made me smile. I could tell that whoever wrote it was very pleased with herself. Not without reason.

The house was large and deeply lived-in, all the shelves and surfaces stacked with books and boxes, framed pictures, old greeting cards set up like tent cities. If there was a spectrum of spaces defined at one end by my barren apartment, this marked the other extreme. Every single surface told a story. A long one. With digressions.

The Loises were in the dining room open to the kitchen, five of them clustered around a long table beside a wide window that showed a panorama of the western city—Golden Gate Park, my neighborhood beyond it, the fuzzy gray bar of the ocean beyond everything. Their hair, bleached by age, glowed in the afternoon light.

If you ever wonder about the difference between Metro Detroit and the San Francisco Bay Area: compare their Lois Clubs.

The hostess, whom I thought of as Hilltop Lois, had owned her house since 1972—an impossible span. She had once run a cheese shop at the base of the hill, and her taste had not grown less discriminating; she served us the stinkiest cheese I have ever been offered at a casual gathering. Nibbling with varying degrees of enthusiasm were also:

• Compaq Lois, who had been a marketing executive at that company in its boom years. Her wrists dripped with bracelets and chunky bangles, all gold; they piled up onto her forearms. She looked like a Valkyrie queen.

• Professor Lois, who taught anthropology at the University of San Francisco. Through the window, she pointed to the spires of St. Ignatius: “I’ve been climbing that hill for a decade.” She was lean like a goat.

• Impeccable Lois, who possessed the kind of sartorial style that stops you on the street. She was wearing jodhpurs—with confidence—and above them an inky denim jacket that any of the cold-eyed wraiths would have killed her to acquire. Literally murdered her. “Don’t wear that down by the ballpark,” I warned.

• Old Lois, who deserved a better nickname, but truly: she was old. Somewhere past ninety. Physically she seemed barely there, curled into herself, but her eyes were bright, and when I walked into the dining room and introduced myself, she crowed: “I didn’t know they were still making Loises!”

They were interesting and lively, their relationships worn-in and comfortable. They had been gathering for two decades. I sat and listened and smiled and genuinely enjoyed myself, though afterward, as I padded down the Farnsworth Steps, I worried that I’d been too quiet—too boring. The other Loises had sharp opinions. They took up space.

They reminded me of Grandma Lois, and I thought about her Chicago Prison Loaf. The absurd density of it. It was the single culinary tradition my family possessed, and it was horrible.

But she had baked it all the time.

As I walked through Golden Gate Park, it struck me: the mystery of that woman’s life. I hadn’t ever known her, not really. I sucked in a deep breath. She had relocated from Wisconsin to Michigan, but before that she’d lived in Chicago and performed with an experimental-theater company, bunking with three other women in a tiny apartment, and not only baking that awful bread but bringing it home to share, because it was free and more or less nutritious. In later years, when she baked Chicago Prison Loaf, it must have conjured that other place, that other time. Four women in bunk beds. Midnight shows. Crimson wigs.

I sat at a computer twelve hours a day and slurped nutritive gel for lunch and dinner.

After my success in college, my neat acquisition of a job, and my precocious home purchase, I had considered myself a child of whom parents and grandparents could be proud. But it struck me then: the starkness of my apartment. Of my life. Grandma Lois, if she could have come to visit—and for the first time ever, I felt a pang, a deep wish that she could visit me here, just her alone, alive—if she could have, and if she had seen me here in San Francisco, she wouldn’t have been proud of me. She would have been sad, and maybe a little bit worried.

I needed a more interesting life.

I could start by learning something.

I could start with the starter.

JESUS CHRIST IN AN ENGLISH MUFFIN

I WALKED TO THE BRIGHT BOOKSTORE on Clement Street and obtained a used copy of The Soul of Sourdough , written by a baker named Everett Broom, whose forearms graced the cover, taut and darkly gleaming, cradling a loaf of bread that was likewise burnished.