My First Baguette Taught Me Everything About Who I Wanted to Be

It was tiny, dark, lit mostly by candlelight. There was a fireplace, and there wasn’t a fireplace, because it was too many years ago I was in this restaurant and cannot remember.

I remember the wine, a swirling burgundy in my glass that made me feel enormously sophisticated. There was a man, not so much older than I was, and we were both in college — I was in Boston, he was in New Hampshire. He liked taking me out to restaurants, and this was our favorite. French, with seductive fragrances and attentive waiters. 

My strongest memory of this time is the bread -- a long, crusty invitation to happiness called a "baguette." The brown crust hid a puffy white bread that seemed to want to swallow butter whole. It wasn’t easy to spread the butter, but once you did and bit into the bread, your mouth closed on a little bit of heaven that promised one day you’d be in France.

To me, it spoke of trains and one-of-a-kind dresses, café au laits, and patisserie shops near the Seine. It made me think of my favorite movie as a child, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It made me believe I could be who I wanted to be — an actor (maybe a famous one), and more importantly, a “woman of the world.” I wasn’t really clear about what that meant, but I knew I wanted to be one.

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Photo by Sergio Arze on Unsplash