What Happened to the Bread-and-Teenager Ladies?

My mom was our neighborhood’s designated bread-and-teenager lady. If you had moved into our neighborhood, my mom would sweep in with a loaf of hot homemade bread and a teenager before you could open the back of your U-Haul.

I know, because I was the teenager. When I went off to college, my younger brother took over.

Before you were completely aware of what was happening, my mom would sweep in, organizing, asking names and birthdays, introducing kids, helping put things away, and keeping up a constant conversation about schools, stores, and everything else one would need to know to thrive in our neighborhood. By the end of the day, you would have felt you’d spent the day with lifelong friends.

And, more often than not, you would have.

I’ve since learned that my mom was not the only bread-and-teenager lady in the world. At one time, any neighborhood worth the name had one. Some actually had two.

Then something changed.

I first noticed it a few years ago, when my mother died of cancer and left a fair-sized piece of Logan, Utah without its bread-and-teenager lady. At her funeral, I looked around the church — filled to overflowing with all those she’d touched — and realized she probably wouldn’t be replaced. Bread-and-teenager ladies have joined typewriters, fountain pens, Poloroid cameras, and the CBS Radio Mystery Theater; they’ve been lost, or driven into small pockets of eccentricity.

But at what cost?

As our houses have grown larger, we’ve retreated into them. Our homes are closer together, but our families are farther apart. We have gas grills, but we never get together for on a Saturday afternoon to roast hot dogs. We have landscaped yards, but our kids have never heard of kick-the-can, let alone played it. And I can’t remember the last time I saw kids playing baseball or soccer in the street — with one of the younger kids assigned to call out when cars were coming.

To be fair, we still have communities. When wildfires ravaged parts of San Diego, there were so many volunteers they actually had to turn people away. What we’ve lost is neighborhoods.

Come to think of it, I have a breadmaker. And neighbors.

Perhaps it’s my turn.