The baker’s melancholy

"Is that a bird?" Lucien asked his father.

Pere Lessard stood over the bread table in the back room of his bakery drawing patterns in the flour with a pastry brush, his forearms dusted white like great snowy hams.

"It's a sailing ship," said Pere Lessard.

Lucien tilted his head this way and that. "Oh yes, now I see it.". He didn't see it at all.

His father slouched, suddenly looking weary. "No you don't. I'm no artist, Lucien. I'm a baker. My father was a baker, and his father before him. Our family has fed the people of the butte for two hundred years. I have smelled of yeast and breathed the dust of flour my whole life. Not one day did our family or friends go hungry, even when there was war. Bread is my life, son, and before I die, I will have made a million loaves."

"Yes, Papa," said Lucien. He had seen his father slide into melancholy like this before, usually like now, right before dawn when they were waiting for the first loaves to come out of the ovens.  He patted his father's arm, knowing that soon the bread would be ready and the bakery would boil with activity that would allow no time to grieve over ships that looked like birds.

"I would trade it all if I could lay down the colors of water like our fiend Monet, or move paint like the joy in a young girl's smile like Renoir.  Do you know what I'm talking about?"

"Yes, Papa," Lucien said. He had no idea what his father was talking about.

---from Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art by Christopher Moore.