The Measure of My Powers: A Memoir of Food, Misery, and Paris

by Jackie Kai Ellis

  II

  I DID TRY TO UNDERSTAND, AS MUCH AS I COULD, THE risks and sacrifices that would come with starting a business. I knew that most start-up business owners don’t make any income for the first three years. So I moved out of the home I owned and rented a tiny, dark basement apartment with electrical wires hanging from the ceiling and mouse droppings hidden in the cupboards. It cost half what I rented mine out for, and I planned to live off the difference. I bought a blow-up mattress in case the situation got so dire that I needed to move into the bakery’s loft and asked the bakery’s landlord if I could use the shower on the second floor of the building if I ever needed it. It was an extreme change, but I didn’t care about any of it. I just wanted to see it happen, this dream of mine, and I was willing to do anything to see it succeed.

  In the midst of the construction and planning, I sold at farmers’ markets, catered events, hosted preopening neighborhood parties, and used every means of getting our name out there. I talked to everyone I met about the bakery: strangers in line at the grocery store, my bank tellers, those in the food community, and people I knew through social media. I radiated pride and passion for my bakery in everything I did, and it created a buzz very naturally. But even so, I simply didn’t know what to expect—certainly not the instantaneous demand that happened when I opened, like a flash flood.

  From the first day, it felt like a maddened frenzy, with lineups and media visits, interviews, and TV appearances, and we were selling out before the day was half over. Since the opening of the bakery had been so delayed due to construction and permitting, I had done everything I could to keep the momentum, and had unknowingly built it to a speed I didn’t expect.

  I thought about the business plan I had written about a year before the bakery opened. I had expected about fifty people a day and had created backup plans for slower weekday afternoons—baking classes for kids, standing on the street wearing a sandwich board and handing out flyers to draw people into my smaller side street. I had planned to hire two people, one to help me in the kitchen in the afternoons, and another to help in the front when I was busy baking in the morning. I had dreams of knowing every one of my customers by name, memorizing their birthdays and their children’s birthdays, so that on those days I would give them a cookie or their usual coffee on the house. I also expected never to travel, to celebrate every holiday in the kitchen, essentially, to live at my bakery, tied to the ovens. And the thought made me happy, alongside the idea that I would be a part of a small community of people that found a home in a place I created. I wanted my food to remind them of the comfort and happiness I had found in food in the years before.

  By the time we opened our doors, the situation had changed drastically and I adapted. There was now a team of twenty, with over 500 people coming a day, and not a second to be slow. Everyone asked me why I had opened such a small space, disappointed that we couldn’t produce more from our tiny kitchen and that there were never seats in the café. But as much as I had prepared for the worst, I had never imagined a scenario like this. So I just did what I could, working around the clock and making a lot of mistakes. I was trying to learn as quickly as I could about what I was supposed to be doing.

  I started the business on my own, but help came from every direction, and people multiplied out of nowhere. Friends, family, industry, my own team: they all came like a steady march of relief, a lineup of firefighters controlling the blaze. My mom and dad showed up in the wee hours of the night, when the bakery was closed, to help me wash floors. I was worrying them because I hadn’t been sleeping or eating, but I simply didn’t have time or energy to worry about what they thought. I had to keep going, working to keep up because I knew that if I didn’t, the bakery simply wouldn’t be able to open its doors the following day, so I pushed on.

  III

  THREE DAYS AFTER BEAUCOUP OPENED, THERE WAS A strange lull, a quiet and unusual caesura amid the craziness that preceded it. It was Christmas Eve and I was at the bakery, working. I felt alone. G and I had finally separated just months before, and being apart on Christmas felt strange. We had spent the last eight holidays together, me making a big turkey dinner with two pies and dozens of sides, taking days to prepare. We took particular care in choosing our Christmas trees each year, pulling out the same ornaments and decorations and repeating the same rituals. Each year, I was delighted to see my favorite ornaments, the little feathery birds and real pinecones, and little twinkly lights shining through glassy, coral-colored leaves that made the tree shine in elegant autumn colors.

  That Christmas Eve, our first after we split, I invited G to eat with me. He didn’t have family in Vancouver, and even if we were not together, I still cared if he spent Christmas alone. But I also missed him and it felt odd not to be together. So he came to the empty bakery at night, while many others were with family celebrating holiday feasts. We sat at a small marble table, ate cheese scones and leftover turkey soup I had frozen from Thanksgiving, and chatted lightheartedly. I was relieved that the most painful parts of our marriage had ended, but I was in pain over the fact it had come to an end at all.

  We saw each other, even if just for little visits, each Christmas afterward. Once it was because he asked me for a particular ornament shaped like a bird. Because we had many, I brought him the wrong one, although it was the only one I had found. He seemed disappointed and told me the one we had bought in Bend, Oregon many years ago had special meaning for him. I was touched and confused as to why this one in particular meant so much to him, but didn’t ask. I looked again but never found it.

  IV

  THOUGH I HAD SO MUCH HELP DURING BEAUCOUP’S opening weeks, there was still much more to be done, and the only way for it all to be finished was to work seventy-two hours at a time, with only a few hours of sleep in between. Many nights I simply slept on the concrete floor, not even bothering to put a coat under me, thinking that it would take up a few more seconds of rest I could otherwise have. Often I wore a baking timer on my apron and would forget that it was running. I would see it later that day, only to realize that twenty-four hours had passed and though I had not stopped working, there was still more to do.

  This went on for several weeks although, frankly, I’m unsure how. I was simultaneously training my staff, working in the kitchen, serving customers in the café, making the product, and doing the administration, the scheduling, and the ordering—and by no means was I doing it well.

  I was irritable and forgetful, leaving timers everywhere, burning trays of cookies and croissants to a shade of black I didn’t know existed. Schedules were late and I missed paydays, and some of my team began to feel very undervalued. The customers began to complain because holiday music was still playing in February. I was sorry and exhausted. I wished I had more to give, but really, I didn’t.

  V

  I CROUCHED OVER AND CAUGHT A FAINT SCENT OF SOMETHING extremely familiar. Immediately, I inspected the bottom of my shoes. I had been carrying a box up a ladder to our storage space. Mysterious. I hadn’t walked outside in weeks, so how would I have stepped in anything? I sniffed around, investigating, and as the smell followed me around it dawned on me that it was on me.

  For weeks, I had barely eaten. There were times I didn’t have time to finish chewing or even to swallow, so if an urgent response was needed, I would spit everything out so I could talk. And when I did eat, it was something easy that I could swallow without much chewing at all—more often than not, it was a scone or a cookie.

  After weeks of this, my entire body shut down and I no longer had the ability to digest the little food I ate. I smelled myself and realized I had shit my pants and didn’t even know it. “How long have I been working like this for?” I asked myself, too tired to laugh, cry, or care. I went to the bathroom to clean myself up, took off my underwear, wrapped it in a plastic bag, and continued to work.

  On occasions when I seemed on the brink of collapse, making robotic motions in the kitchen with my eyes completely empty of thoug
ht, my staff would push me out of the bakery, threatening to choke me with the string of my apron if I didn’t leave for a nap. I distinctly remember one morning I walked through the front door of my nearly empty apartment (which never did feel like a home after G left). I panicked when I saw all the lights on. “Someone must have broken in!” I thought in dread. Then it dawned on me that it was simply daytime, and I had not seen my own home in the daylight for so long, I had forgotten what it looked like.

  I laughed at myself and proceeded to bed for a nap. I woke up a few hours later to an alarm, covered in my own excrement again. I had just enough time to shower and leave the mess. Hours or days later, I’m not sure, I came back home ready for sleep, and I was so exhausted I couldn’t deal with the mess. So I put the blanket on top and simply slept on it. I really don’t remember how long this went on before someone offered to clean my apartment, and found it.

  “Um…Jackie…So I found something strange in your bed,” they called me to tell me. They seemed a mixture of surprised, amused, and worried.

  “Yeah? What?” I responded, my mind elsewhere.

  “Shit.”

  “Oh yeah. Sorry,” I said nonchalantly. I wasn’t embarrassed; I was too preoccupied with all the other tasks. So I hung up.

  But this is the amazing part: no matter how tired I was or how much work I put in, I don’t remember ever feeling unhappy. It was just what needed to be done in order for my dream to have a chance of succeeding. I was willing to do anything, and I felt relieved to see people filing in each day and telling me how much they loved it, or that it reminded them of France. I was pouring everything I had into Beaucoup: all my hopes, my passions, my love, and also the pain of my failed marriage. I desperately wanted to prove that I could be happy, that everything would be beautiful, because it had to be. It was all I had.

  VI

  IT WAS LATE, I WAS TIRED AND ALONE, ROLLING CROISSANTS to the sound of the radio. Feeling so exhausted, and with maybe a touch of self-pity, I crouched on the floor of the kitchen and cried, hoping that letting it out would make me feel better. But just as the tears began to fall, I stopped. The longer I cried, the less time I would have to sleep later, I realized, and it frankly didn’t seem worth it. Everything I desperately wanted was finally happening: my bakery existed, and there were people coming, and it seemed silly to cry, so I stopped and went back to rolling croissants.

  Years later, my team would reminisce about the early days, and I realized that I had no recollection of so much of the six months after we opened. Some memories were probably so hideous that I forgot them out of embarrassment.

  There was the three-question rule. In the beginning, my staff came to me with multitudes of questions, as I was the only person who knew the answers to “Should I say yes to this special order?” or “Is this done baking?” The questions became unbearable with everyone asking the same one more than twice.

  In an ideal world, I would have written a guide holding all the answers and made everyone memorize it, but I didn’t know how to open a bakery. And the questions came, constantly and repetitively, when I was already doing three things at one time. So I made a rule: each person was only allowed to ask me three questions a day. I hoped this would force them to remember, collaborate, share their answers, and use their precious questions wisely.

  One morning, one of my chefs walked into the kitchen when I was in the middle of baking for the day and planning the next day in my mind, all the while being utterly sleep-deprived.

  “Good morning Jackie! How are you?” she asked cheerfully.

  “Good. That was question number one,” I said, looking her in the eyes sternly. And then I walked away. My team teased me about it later; it’s a vague recollection, like a dream.

  VII

  MONTHS PASSED AND SEVENTY-TWO HOURS TURNED TO forty-eight, which turned to twenty-four, and I started to get more than a few naps here and there.

  As everyone began to learn their roles and become proficient in them, I started to give them more responsibility, until one day I could wildly imagine that the bakery would run for a week without me. So I went to Paris for the first time in years. When I came back, everything was fine, in fact, even more beautiful than I had left it because everyone in the team had come together to make it their own.

  VIII

  YEARS AFTER THE BAKERY OPENED, MY ROLE HAD CHANGED again. I had realized that my best role was not working day after day in the kitchen, but in directing, fostering, and promoting the business. Naturally, a path led me to focus on marketing, mentoring, and trying to make sure that Beaucoup inspired in everything we did, which was my biggest intention. I began to follow opportunities to write, speak, and judge, and I expanded my vision into The Paris Tours. I also began creating scholarships.

  “There was a time I thought I would be tied to the oven,” I thought while sitting in a park in Paris one January. “There was a time when I thought I’d never travel again, and a time I thought I would never see Paris again.” I smiled. Life is strange and curious, and I felt extremely grateful for the way it turned out, knowing it could not have been any other way.

  “You’re not the kitchen type, Jackie,” a friend said to me shortly before Beaucoup opened. She saw that this unsettled me. “You won’t stay there forever, and it’s OK. You’re meant to do other things.” Sitting on the park bench in Paris, I understood what she meant, though a small part of me was a touch mournful that I never had the chance to learn every one of my customers’ names, or their children’s birthdays, and that I hadn’t been able to give them a cookie or coffee on those days. I always worked for Beaucoup to give the same hope and comfort that food had given me once, even if I am no longer the one at the oven for seventy-two hours at a time.

  IX

  I RECENTLY WENT BACK TO PROVENCE. IT WAS EARLY summer, and I made a special trip to some of the places I had been before out of a strange kind of nostalgia and a need to heal the painful memories that still remained in me so many years later. I needed to relive the beauty and sorrow I felt there with G, and I knew that being immersed in those places, the details, smells, and tastes, would unearth memories buried deep inside me, ones I was ready to remember. So I visited the markets in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue and dined at the hilltop restaurant in Bonnieux, and bought the same fresh cheeses covered in woody herbs to eat on a sunny step.

  One afternoon, while exploring Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, I happened into a tiny store, and there, hanging on a twirling rack, were dozens of the same bird ornaments we had bought in Oregon a decade ago. So I bought one for G, and texted him. “I could never find that bird ornament you wanted. Then I was in a small town in Provence and saw one just like it. I’ll give it to you next Christmas with some Mexican wedding cookies. How does that sound?”

  X

  THERE ARE RARE MOMENTS NOWADAYS WHEN I HAPPEN to be at the bakery by myself. It’s quiet, just the clunking noise of the espresso machine and a low hum of the refrigerators. I like to sit in the corner. In these moments I experience a mixture of feelings. I’m reminded of those beginning days of Beaucoup, and my body shudders at the memory of everything I put it through. I think of the bakery full of people, and I’m overcome with enormous waves of disbelief and gratitude. I think of all the beautiful pastries my team and I create every single day, and the people who come in and eat and are satisfied. I imagine that maybe someone who felt sad one day came to be fed, and that maybe they left a bit happier. I’ve been in crowded rooms while people discuss my bakery with emphatic delight, unaware that it is mine, and I feel a rush of pride and gratitude for all the passionate people who have had a hand in creating this dream with me.

  I think to myself, it’s unreal that I can touch the marble tables I designed, that I am sitting in one of the chairs I spent hours searching for, that it actually exists, this dream.

  THE MEASURE OF MY POWERS

  {2016}

  TO BE HAPPY YOU MUST HAVE TAKEN the measure of your powers, TASTED THE FRUITS OF YOUR PASSION, and LE
ARNED YOUR PLACE in the WORLD.

  George Santayana

  ONE NIGHT, WHILE VISITING PARIS AGAIN—AS I OFTEN do now—I spoke to a dear love over the phone. I was reminded of the past and how painful it was. I cried, and I told him I was terrified of being so sad again, of being swallowed by the pain of depression again.

  And he said to me, with so much love in his heart, “Of all the things you’ve accomplished in your life, the one you should be most proud of is that you have truly learned to love yourself.”

  My dear love was right. I was no longer the same woman, and there was no reason to be afraid anymore. I had grown, seen, lost, and learned to love, above all myself. It was through seeing the beauty of the world that I began to recognize it in myself, and I learned that the world is beautiful and that I was no different.

  So the time had come to let go again, to release my fears so that I could live freely as who I am. And though I will continue to grow and hurt and laugh and cry, I know now that I am also strong, wise, and incredibly brave.

  A RECIPE FOR SEEING BEAUTY

  1 beautiful rose, sweet smelling

  Place the rose near your face. Allow its silky petals to graze your cheek, and close your eyes. Take a breath in, your nose deep in its center so that the blossom surrounds your face and almost hits your eyelashes. Consider its fragrance. Ask yourself, “Does it smell vaguely of anise? Or of pineapples? Or of apricots?”

  Afterward, place the blossom in a cup—any cup will do—and set it beside your bed, on the windowsill or a table, beside a book you’ve been reading, or a journal, or your glasses. And when you wake up the following day, keep your eyes closed and breathe in the lovely scent again before opening your eyes to the morning.