Two young boys come home to an
empty house and the smell of fresh bread. On the kitchen counter sits a loaf of
beautifully wrapped bread."Should we?" asked one brother to the other.
"I
don't know. It looks like it's wrapped for someone else."
There is
a short contemplative silence and then a decision is made.
"I
have an idea," says one brother to the other, "We can cut off the end
and hollow out the middle. Just a little
bit." The drawer is opened, the
bread knife poised to make a clean cut. The soft bread is so delicious that soon a
tunnel is finished in a hollow loaf of bread.
Mom is proud
that day when she gets home late and sees the bread looks perfectly
intact. She calls her boys and asks them
to deliver the bread to the widow down the street. They dare not look at each other as they pick
up the unusually light loaf of bread.
They stand at the door of the widow's
home. She graciously accepts the
homemade loaf of bread. They head home
and wait in fear for their impending, deserved punishment. Any moment now, the old widow will slowly
hobble down the street and show their mother the mean trick her sons have
played.
The widow
never came. Mother never found out. Sixty years later one of those once young
boys still wonders what happened.
~~
A distinguished professor from UCLA is
spending a few days in our home. I check
the guestroom before his arrival. The
bed is neatly made; the room is in order.
I dust and vacuum the room, lay fresh towels on a chair.
The first morning he awakes, I greet him as
he comes down the stairs. I ask him how
he slept and he smiles, but in an odd sort of way. He comes down each morning with that odd
smile of gratitude. After he leaves, it is a few days before I go to the
guestroom to change the sheets and remake the bed. He politely remade the bed and left the room
in perfect order. I pull off the bed
spread and to my immediate horror, there is no bedding. No fitted sheet. No cover sheet. No
blanket. Our guest slept on a bare
mattress.
Postscript: You have heard the familiar saying many
times, “It's not what is on the outside that matters but what is on the
inside.” That goes for people, beds and
bread.
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