A Tribute to my First Boss

and the bakery that helped me grow up.

Once upon a time, in the city of Kalamazoo in the state of freezing cold winters and dazzling summers known as Michigan, there lived an eighteen-year-old girl who had just completed her homeschool education. It was me.

I had done all my learning at home from the age of five on up in the homeschooling era before homeschool co-ops, homeschool associations and all the rest that’s so common now. We were considered a weird family, indeed. Homeschooling now is so commonplace, hardly anyone blinks an eye when you mention it. But back then, I was quite alone. I had my family, my books, and my own rich inner world where I spent most of my time.

I was quiet, studious, introverted, introspective, extraordinarily conscientious, sensitive. I struggled to communicate with other humans, mostly because I couldn’t imagine anyone would be at all interested in anything I had to say…and at eighteen, I had no clue where I fit into the world.

My idea of a good time was curling up on the couch with a big, fat book, practicing my piano or violin, singing, sewing doll clothes for my little nieces and going for long walks through a nearby neighborhood with my dogs, admiring the old houses and imagining what they looked like inside or letting my mind wander while I wandered, dreaming up stories in my head.

I did not hang out. I had no one to hang out with, and I wasn’t exactly sure how it was done, anyway. From what I observed, it seemed to involve roaming the mall in large groups like herds of antelope on the African plains, employing various mating and hierarchical strategies, and I wasn’t sure I liked the looks of that. I’d never been terribly competitive, after all, against anyone but myself.

However, at eighteen, the problem of money and paying my way in the world began to concern me, and I decided it was time to find gainful employment of some sort. Fortunately for me, we had known a family of young kids for some years. My dad was a piano teacher and a couple of the kids took lessons from him. This family owned a small bakery with a funny-sounding name which, when pronounced properly, doesn’t sound at all like the name looks—Boonzaaijer Bakery.

It is pronounced as follows: Bone-zi-er. It is a Dutch name as its founder, Opa Boonzaaijer, was from the Netherlands. Remember that because there will be a quiz at the end of this story.

Anyway, I decided to apply there as I knew they were always closed on Sunday and that meant I could keep going to church regularly, and that was the only reason I started my job quest at Boonzaaijer with no back up plan. With other entry-level jobs this negotiation over Sundays is frequently a headache, and I didn’t feel like dealing with that. So, one day my dad drove me over to the bakery (that’s correct, I still didn’t have my license), and I met my future boss, Marty, in his official capacity.

I had seen him before at Dad’s piano recitals, but never at the bakery, and confronted with this wry fellow in an apron, I was suddenly filled with my old friend, self-doubt. After all, what did I actually know about anything? Not much. About bakeries? Nothing at all.

I got my application and my dad bought me my first ever European pastry—a marzipan bar—while I filled it out. What is a marzipan bar, you ask? Well, it’s just the most divine trip for your tastebuds you’ve ever imagined. Let’s see if I can describe it for you with my best Boonzaaijer sales’s girl, sales’ pitch.

“Our marzipan bars are two layers of vanilla cake, filled with rum-infused buttercream frosting, wrapped in a thin layer of marzipan, with both ends dipped in dark chocolate.”

I finished my application, turned it in, and then ate this wondrous concoction and then felt a trifle sick afterwards. (But it was totally worth it!) Then I went home and wondered if anything at all would transpire in my favor.

It did, in fact. Marty gave me a call some days or weeks later, I can’t recall exactly, and asked me to come in for an interview. So, I brought my quiet, introverted, introspective self there and answered his questions with very few words. I can’t remember if he hired me on the spot or called me later. At any rate, he hired me on a three-month trial and I began my employment a few weeks before the bakery’s yearly month-long break during August. Yes, the bakery closed every August for the entire month to give everyone a much needed break.

Of course, that meant the customer base came rushing in those last few weeks to get their cakes and pastries before we left. It was wild. The first day I went to work, I punched in and basically trotted nonstop throughout the day until closing time. There was much to learn.

• The price sheet with all the different cake sizes, options, extra charges.

• Know the names of all the pastries, how to describe them, and what they contained.

• Learn how to answer the phone properly. “Boonzaaijer Bakery! This is Amanda. How may I help you?”

• Learn how to take cake orders.

• How to greet the customers properly. Smile! No mumbling. Act like you’re glad to see them!

• How to run the cash register and make change properly. (We weren’t allowed to use the cash register’s function for that. We had to do it the old fashioned way and count it back into the customer’s hand.)

• The cleaning protocol after hours.

• And a good bit more, besides…

At the end of that first day, I came home, fell into a chair and stared at the wall in a daze. I was so exhausted from being “on” that long, I had no mental or physical energy for anything else besides sleep. Remember, I was a quiet, solitary person, and there was nothing quiet or solitary about the bakery.

It was very good for me. There’s nothing for it but to grow up, and nothing makes you grow up faster than diving headfirst into an unfamiliar experience and learning to thrive there, having the expectation placed upon you to show up on time and fulfill your duties in a professional manner, regardless of your personality type.

Upon reflection, I realize that though it’s true I didn’t know anything at all about bakeries when I took that job, I did know some things. I knew how to be teachable. I knew how to do my utmost. I knew how to be dependable, and I believe Marty appreciated that about me.

In return, he taught me some of the most valuable life lessons I still draw from today. I’m not sure he realized he was teaching them at the time, but I did learn them all the same.

I had all the most important things my parents taught me reinforced in spades. When weighing out butter cookies for packaging and sale, I was told to always allow the weight to go a fraction of an ounce over, but never under because…

“A false weight is an abomination to the Lord.”

This is one of the things I’m most grateful for…that never in my employment at the bakery did I feel that I had to fail my God to keep my job. I was never asked to lie, never asked to cheat the customer, never asked to keep away from Sunday services to keep the gears turning…because when I was in church, so was my boss and his family…and the bakery was quiet and at rest.

I also don’t think it’s terribly common for teenagers to discuss theology and faith with their bosses while doing the daily degreasing and disinfecting of surfaces after hours, but I had that privilege as well.

I learned to know and care about the regulars. The little trio of elderly Dutch ladies who came in at least once a week for their pastries and coffee and conversation. When clearing away their dishes afterwards, I’d marvel at the quarter inch of not quite dissolved sugar in the bottoms of their coffee cups. They liked their coffee sweet. Then there was the severe Dutch psychiatrist who grew fond of me because I always remembered how he liked his Gemberkoek wrapped up. It had to be from the freezer, double bagged in plastic just so. Then there was the little “olie bollen” lady, who came in every Saturday when it was in season, smiling sweetly. She’d hand us exact change for her weekly olie bollen and coffee treat, then go sit down by the window and eat it slowly with great relish. She always left a couple of quarters for whoever cleared her dishes away, which was very sweet because tips were not required. We were all sad when she stopped coming in and sadder still when we discovered that she had passed away.

These were the people who became my creative inspiration for the short film my brother and I made years later, “The Wednesday Morning Breakfast Club.” In fact, all of my major creative endeavors have been linked with Boonzaaijer Bakery in some form other. My favorite duty was dish duty in the back room bent over a steaming hot sink of soapy water and gobs of melting buttercream. I could retreat once more into my head back there, scrubbing pastry bags in the hottest water I could stand, while the massive dishwasher beside me shacked, rattled and rolled in deafening fashion. I thought up the second half of my novel The Pursuit of Elizabeth Millhouse over that sink. And it was while I walked to work, drowning out the sounds of Westnedge Ave with The Lark Ascending via my MP3 player, that the beginning concepts of the novel I just finished, 27, began to form in my mind.

You might even say that none of these stories would ever have been written if I hadn’t worked at Boonzaaijer Bakery and learned the greatest lesson of all—that personality is no excuse for being a bad communicator, not smiling, not being pleasant, and failing to provide excellent customer service. From the beginning, Marty insisted on a pleasant demeanor, preferably all the time, but especially when dealing with customers. Often he drove the point home with good-humored jokes at my or his own expense. He would stand and make faces at me from the back room where only I could see him and not the customer to illustrate what my face looked like and then demonstrate what it should look like. Half the time, I genuinely didn’t realize what my face looked like and how off-putting that could be!

I learned that putting on a smile even when your heart was heavy, was not fake or insincere. Putting on a smile could, in fact, change the way I felt inside. During those seven years at the bakery, the seeds of my coming health catastrophe due to the Lyme disease I didn’t know I was carrying were growing up, and I physically hurt, a lot. The fatigue could be crushing. My mind hurt a lot, too. And though introspection can be a blessing at times, it can turn into a prison if not properly balanced with other needed qualities.

There were days when I absolutely dragged myself to work, pained in mind and body, only to realize that within an hour or so, I felt much better. It turns out, that stepping outside our anxious minds to pour care and service into complete strangers, makes a rather potent pain reliever. I still hurt, but it wasn’t unbearable and all-consuming anymore. Also, our customers were usually (with quite rare exceptions) just so happy to come into the best bakery in town. The big grins they couldn’t help but flash as soon as they walked through the door were a bit catching.

“I don’t know how you stay so thin!” they’d say, sniffing the wonderful aroma that pervaded the place. “If I worked here, I’d be 300 pounds!”

But more important than even the heavenly scent, I believe there was a different scent, a metaphysical scent they were picking up on…the scent of grace, mercy and truth.

A place takes on a certain atmosphere based on the leadership of whoever is in charge, for better or for worse. The food business is a difficult business. The hours are long, the work strenuous. It would have been easy for the whole place to have exuded a harried, tense and frustrated energy, but it didn’t. And that was down to Marty.

He eased tense moments and tempered needed criticism with humor. He was long-suffering with his employees and gave many of them chance after chance to improve when many bosses in his position would have just fired them. He was merciful and gracious when mistakes were made.

Not long after I began working there, I made a whopper.

I was incredibly forgetful. I had, as you recall, a lot going on in my head and I would frequently get lost up there. Important things would also get lost up there, such as what days of the week we were always closed. I made the grave error of taking a cake order for Monday. We were always closed on Monday. It was so stupid. The worse part about it was that as soon as the customer made the order, she went on vacation and could not be reached to change the pick up date.

I felt truly horrible. Marty was not pleased, but again, didn’t chew me out like I deserved. It ended up that we honored the order, and Marty came into the bakery all by himself at the appointed day and time to unlock the door for that customer alone and hand her a cake. I never did that again.

One of the worst things I did almost makes me shudder to remember. We had a collection of clear, acrylic cake stands which some brides liked to use for their wedding cakes. They were quite expensive to buy and we required an extra deposit for their use, because if they became damaged, replacing them was costly. Well, they were stored in the same storage room as the unassembled cake boxes…on the floor. I went in there one day to retrieve something. Absent-minded as usual, I did not realize that the thing under my foot was the base of one of these cake stands and as I leaned forward to lift something off a high shelf, my leg put pressure against the pedestal and I heard and felt a sickening SNAP. I had broken the base clear off the pedestal.

Once again, I felt dreadful. Marty admonished me about taking more care and reminded me how much the thing cost. I begged him to please, please take it out of my pay, but again, he was too kind and gracious to do that. Another experience, another I never repeated.

So…you’re probably wondering where all these memories came from and why.

It was about a week and half ago when the news reached me that Boonzaaijer Bakery is closing its doors for good on December 23. Instant sadness, like the sadness of losing an old friend, washed over me. But I understood.

Marty has been working the same grueling schedule for many, many years now and he is tired. He couldn’t do it forever and it’s wise to recognize one’s limits. But I think of this as a loss to Kalamazoo. The city won’t be the same without it.

I moved away from Michigan when I married Jonathon. My wedding, like so many others, was graced with a beautiful cake—filled by Dawn, frosted by Lane and decorated by Marty.

The memories have come thick and fast: Marty leaning over his bench working magic on hundreds of wedding cakes with parchment paper and buttercream, Joyce decorating cakes for the storefront, Lane at her bench icing away, while little Garrett who is not so little anymore, sneaks under the bench to give her a good startle. Dawn in her corner filling cakes with that marvelous stuff Kalamazoo will miss so much, Bavarian cream, encouraging me to, “Run, rabbit! Run!” as I dash up to the store from my mopping and floor scrubbing to give my co-workers a hand as the line of customers builds.

I won’t get to see any of that again, and that makes me sad. But on the other hand, I have lots of photos stored in my head. I can taste a marzipan bar right this moment and I’d give about anything to eat one again. My doc has forbidden me to eat gluten anymore, but if I can get my hands on an original, genuine Boonzaaijer Bakery marzipan bar, I’ll eat it anyway, stomach ache or not, in memory of the place that taught me so much. The bakery that helped me grow up.

Marty, I wish you a happy retirement. God bless all of you at Boonzaaijer Bakery! And God bless Kalamazoo! You’ve been lining up down the sidewalk every day since the news broke. So, may you each get a little something to remember this lovely place by for many years to come.

Merry Christmas!

That’s all for now. Until next time, folks…