Bread and Bread

My predecessor at work just had a baby; this morning I did the math and realized that she must have been in her first trimester when she left to start a freelance career. Inexplicably (or totally explicably, if you have access to my therapist’s notes from the last eight years) this revelation filled me with rage, despite the fact that she has been nothing but generous to me, and I almost never see her. When she departed, she left a 20-page, impeccably organized legacy document with links to relevant spreadsheets. When I spoke with her on the phone the day before her due date, she said she’d had her hospital bag packed since her second trimester. She’s that kind of person, the kind who makes a brilliant plan and sticks to it. My boss often gets wistful about the good old days of her, and that doesn’t help my feelings of inadequacy. According to my messed-up brain, my predecessor is living a better version of my life, and I’m slopping along behind, splashing in the rainwater in ...

It was a regular, busy weekend in a lot of ways. AK and I babysat Kohana, which consisted mostly of keeping one ear on the baby monitor while we watched old episodes of Roseanne on TV. I went to a sort of Tupperware-party-for-clothes thing at my sister’s house. And we packed for our trip to Montana next week. But in the middle of all of that was Rachel’s memorial. The main one was in Denver , where she and Jeff and their kids moved about a year and a half ago, but they had roughly a thousand friends in L.A., so Jeff said goodbye twice. Or, more likely, he said goodbye quietly on his own and then endured as the rest of us attempted to wade through this absurd event. I imagine it’s like being drafted as the male lead in a really nightmarish play, this huge audience analyzing your performance. I don’t know, maybe it’s not like that at all. At first it just felt like a big barbecue, with really amazing tacos at the home of some people from Jeff and Rachel’s church. They live...