I’m not sure about the garden this year. Last year, we attempted green beans but something’s changed in the soil around our place and the fertile spot that, as a child, kept me well-stocked through the fall and winter now produces, at best, scraggly weeds.

Perhaps I could find another spot in the yard. With food prices going up, up, up, and quality heading in the other direction, there’s a good motivation to grow our own. But age and necessity have provided another option, and its proven a real hit with our house: bread.

While our family was stationed in Germany a few years back, we had plenty of opportunity to enjoy the high quality and low price of food found at the regular supermarket. Massive heads of Boston lettuce for less than a buck. Scores of potato dishes or frozen vegetable mixtures that you’d have to go to a five-star restaurant to beat. A single aisle dedicated to yogurt — none of it low-fat, and all of it better tasting than any pudding or ice cream. The only thing they couldn’t seem to manage were simple orange juice and a decent steak.

But it was the bread that I remember the best. I don’t even remember how many varieties there were at the tiny bakeries on street corners, never mind the ones inside the large supermarkets (even Walmart). All of it fantastic, and all of it cheap.

Three long pepperoni twisted rolls for less than $2. Baguettes with no preservatives that stayed fresh for days. Large crusty white rolls, which proved a godsend to a teething Sofie, for only 10 cents. And sunflower seed bread so dense with kernels that it was referred to as an “egel” (hedgehog).

Main ingredients: flour, salt, water, yeast. Not very hi-tech. But even the worst bread here costs twice as much as another First World country, that at the time had almost $4 gas but managed $1 bread.

But I put up with it. That is until gas went above $3. Some switch must have tripped been tripped, and I broke out the until-then-unused German bread recipe book. First up was the sunflower hedgehog. That required sourdough. Real sourdough. Couldn’t find it anywhere, so I finally found a recipe to make it.

I never knew it could take so long and so much effort to make something go bad. Once we added it to the bread batter, the question arose whether it had gone bad in the right way. What if it went bad 
badly? Would it make us sick?

Being the only man in a house full of women, the only answer I could come up with was, “Heat kills everything.” Besides, I was hungry.

And it does. We ended up with an oblong brick, which while tasty, was heavy enough to be classified as a deadly weapon if raised in anger. It takes two rounds on our toaster set on high to get it warmed up enough to spread anything on it. And, as far as I can tell, it has bran or any other fiber beat — use with caution.

Our attempts at white bread have been even more tasty, but far more benign and breathtakingly simple. With an active and hungry five-year-old around, this stuff goes quickly. It also makes a fun Sunday morning ritual — baking day. Kneading is the best part.  There’s little better for a kid than to sink their hands into sweet-smelling goo.

So reflecting on the possibility of the garden, it may lie fallow this year, replaced by the bread stone. I’ll happily trade away the damage done to my back and knees in a garden for a few minutes of pounding dough. The onset of old age may have been the reasons human went from hunter-gatherers to baking grains in the first place.

Now if we can just set up a barter this summer with a gardener with an excess of cucumbers, tomatoes or green beans…

At the Easter Egg hunt in Chase Park, I ran into Tim Wood and Rowan and asked if they’d seen Sofie. Having just turned five, she’s just a little younger than Rowan. So Tim’s alarm was understandable, figuring I had lost her somewhere in the crowd.

I allayed his concern, explaining, “No, I dropped off her and Chandra here and then parked around the corner.” Glancing about at the gathered masses of kids and parents, I added, “It shouldn’t be too hard to find Chandra in this crowd.” To which Tim had to agree.

And yet, I still had a problem finding the woman I’ve been seeing for three years now – a black woman – in a small park in Chatham. She has the ability to effortlessly dematerialize, which may come from her growing up in Dorchester. It was particularly uncanny in this day’s sea of otherwise pale faces.

So as the candidacy of Barack Obama has risen, and then taken on directly issues of race in America, it has come at a time of increasing seriousness in my relationship with a professional, masters-educated journalist and health care writer, who is also black. Both having a great interest in politics, but being of opposite parties, we’ve become each other’s sounding boards for discussions on television news, talk radio and blogs. Closer to home, however, race is an issue in talking about our future.

The theme common to both the presidential campaigns and any future Chandra and I may have is that race is an unresolved issue in America. Not just in East Crackerbarrell, Georgia, but here on Cape Cod. That makes people uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable. But in a small place, it is pretty clear when someone is being treated differently.

One early summer evening two years ago, while I was handing out balloons at a Cardinals game in Orleans, Chandra took Sofie to the playground at the opposite end of Eldredge Park. As expected the place was crawling with kids, parents and grandparents. Done with my campaigning, I came over to relieve Chandra from watching Sofie, who was playing with another little girl. I was dressed well, as was Chandra (as always). She went over to a large planter surrounding a tree nearby.

As she did so, the father of the girl Sofie was playing with looked up, looked over at Chandra, looked over at his wife and yelled to her to move their bag, which was eight feet away on the other side of the planter in plain site. This, after she had been there half an hour already with God knows how many other people around. Perhaps the guy realized that he had left his personal possessions exposed – but it took the presence of someone dark skinned nearby to them that flipped his mental switch.

I’d never seen this before. Not blatantly. Perhaps that’s the beauty of growing up in an almost 100 percent white town. You never get bald-faced bigotry demonstrated to you for the simple reason there are no potential victims.

But before the smug that-doesn’t-happen-here attitude kicks in, consider this: More than a few times, we’ve been out at the beach or playground with Sofie – my blond-haired, blue-eyed Alpine princess – and when it has been time to go, another parent will refer to Chandra as Sofie’s mommy. It is not the same parent every time. But every time it happens, the person is white, and is from a large metropolitan area much more diverse than here.

Contrast this with Chandra’s reception here by locals. She’s followed around stores by otherwise inattentive clerks. She’s asked what inn she works at. She’s solicited for cleaning Saturday changeovers. In the fall people ask her when she’s going back. Friends of mine who would come from Jamaica for summer work said this was regular rapport with white people here. So when Chandra is with Sofie, she’s often asked if she is the new au pair. Too often, her experience being black in Chatham has been to be seen first as a servant.

For a person who grew up in the poor all-white town of Chatham, I see that as quite a step. Backward. If that is uncomfortable to read, it is worse to live with. And like concrete, once set, a public perception is tough to change.

When she studied in London, Chandra saw a city where interracial couples were practically the rule. To a lesser extent, it is becoming more common in the U.S. So, as Barack Obama said, the situation is not static. Attitudes are changing, slowly, on both sides. It may take a whole generation of biracial children to break the silent stalemate between those who say “Let go of the past,” and those who answer, “But it just happened five minutes ago – again!”

I hope for that. At some point, being black in America will be no different than being Italian or Irish. Or, like Sofie, part Mexican, part Austrian, part old-line Yankee. Someday. It has taken longer, though, and that’s because they were the original easily-discernible underclass. The nation, as a whole, has had two chances to get it right – first with the Constitution, and second after the Civil War – but ditched it for political expediency.

To be fascinated by American history is to be fascinated with the issue of race. It is a stubborn thing, and an uncomfortable thing. Though I want it to be assigned to history – and history alone – as I go forward with Chandra, the question of race come down to this:

If Sofie were to have a brother or sister, would that son or daughter of mine, more likely to look like her mother or the junior Senator from Illinois, be treated the same by my country and my community?

I’d like to say yes. But the answer today, uncomfortably, is no.

Read the previous installment here.

On the first of December I finished up a major writing and photography project.  It had consumed the better part of the past 6 months for me, and had taken longer than expected – partly because of technical issues (my computer is old and slow) and partly because of environmental conditions (it was raining or foggy when I needed it to be clear).  So when I raised my head up and finally had a chance to look around, it was the smack in the middle of the holiday season.  And it has never been so welcome.

First off, Thanksgiving had just wrapped up, but I was still in a thankful mood.  I still had 4 weeks in which to get things together, coherently, for Christmas.  As typical of my gender, I will give thought to gifts for loved ones as early as the day before Christmas Eve.  But I’ll wait until the shopkeeper is walking to his front door with key in hand at 9 PM on the 24^th before I relent and make a commitment to actually buy presents.