Following the bread trail

I hardly ever saw my son as he rushed to after-school band practices, an evening class in Camden, a part time job and various church activities.
“I know you’re growing up, but I’d like to see you sometime,” I said wistfully as he headed out the door again.
He turned warily, “I would like to see me sometime, too.”
After a couple days of seeing that same weariness in my usually hyper-energetic teenager, I urged him to quit the job and offered to drive him to class.
One night as we left El Dorado, I interrupted his reading, “Looks like the bread truck had an accident.” Squashed plastic sacks of bread and packaged snack cakes littered the blacktop. He looked, mumbled something and went back to reading.
A few miles down the road, I nudged him, “Somebody must have left the back door of the bread truck open.” Yellow, plastic wrapped loaves of bread rested neatly on the asphalt shoulder as on a store shelf.
“We ought to pick them up.”
“Moooom,” he protested. I drove on silently.
The next time I saw a loaf, I slowed down and headed for it. “Come on, all you have to do is open the door, bend down and pick it up.”
He sighed in exasperation but opened the door. The bread was out of reach. He got out, picked up the loaf and jammed it in the back seat.
“There are you satisfied?” He whacked his book open. A few miles down the road, I saw a familiar patch of yellow against the black asphalt.
“I’ll bet that bread truck driver is as fed up with life as you are,” I said as I slowed down beside the loaf. “He is showing the world what he thinks with each loaf he tosses out.”
He looked at me and grinned as he picked up the loaf. “Yeah, maybe he is,” he agreed, dropping the loaf and his book in the back seat.
He spotted the next one.
I slowed down and he scooped up the loaf in a perfect “Dukes of Hazzard” swoop.
For the next half hour, we had a grand time as we rescued the bread from the roadside fate the bread man had tossed them out to endure.
My son’s weariness dissolved as he was swept away in our tracking of the bread trail from El Dorado to Camden-Tech.
“What are we going to do with all this bread, Mom?” he asked as he made a hook shot to the back seat with yet another loaf.
“I don’t know. It’s just fun.”
A we turned off the highway to head for Camden-Tech, we sat back confident the game was over. “Where do you suppose that bread truck was going?” he mused.
“I don’t know,” I shrugged then veered he wheel to the right, “but he took this road, too.”
As another loaf flew into the back seat with the rest. I wondered which had more bread, our car or the bread truck?
Maybe we should have left them where they lay beside the road.
Maybe it was a modern version of Hansel’s trail of bread crumbs to show the way back to El Dorado.
Naah, more like the manna in the wilderness. At least on the trip home we didn’t see any of the loves we missed and our bit of fun nourished the soul because we grabbed it while the bread was still there.


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