My grandmother, who we called Mom Mom, lived with my grandfather, who we called Pop, two blocks up the street from where I grew up in South Buffalo, N.Y. Every Saturday morning Mom Mom would get out her giant battered aluminum mixing bowl and a five-pound bag of Pillsbury Enriched Flour and a stack of heat-blackened aluminum bread pans and start making enough bread for her and Pop and her daughter's ever-growing family down the street, of which I was the oldest son.

 I’d wake up on one of these school-free summer days and watch as many Saturday morning TV cartoons as my mother would allow and, banished from the living room, I’d race down to 18 Turner Ave. where Mom Mom was already bustling about the kitchen.

 I’d knock on the side door and Pop would let me in. He was retired but never lost his workingmaa's habit of rising early. He liked to spend his  mornings sipping coffee and reading the paper, dressed in a sleeveless ribbed undershirt, dark pants and bedroom slippers. He was a man of few words. If he was ever surprised to see me, he never showed it. I never wondered if he resented being banished to the living room on Saturdays while Mom Mom and I took over the kitchen.

Both my maternal grandparents were orphans. Pop, whose real name was Andy, was one of New York City’s  “railroad children,” orphans from the New York City Foundling Home who were shipped by train to various towns and cities across the country and taken in by couples who needed or wanted children. Pop was one of the lucky ones. He was wanted. He got off the train in Dubois Pa. to a hard life that he never complained about.

Mom Mom, whose real name was Ermine, had three sisters and a brother whose father struggled unsuccessfully to raise them alone. They wound up in a DuBois orphanage run by nuns who would have made Charles Dickens blanch in horror. Mom Mom eventually taken in by a local and became their "girl." The family treated her kindly and Mom Mom always revered them. They became her family, since her memories of her real parents couldn't survive the orphanage.

None of this did I know or care about on those summer morning visits.  All that mattered then was the moment I breezed past Pop at the back door and entered Mom Mom’s kitchen which was already drenched in the two aromas I loved most in the world – the smell of dough rising on the stovetop and  -- even better -- the smell of that same dough becoming bread in the oven below.

I’d burst into the kitchen, breathless from my run. Mom Mom would give me a kiss and tell me to go wash my hands. We had plenty of work to do.

Her hands and arms would be dusted with flour, but you could hardly tell because her skin was so pale white to begin with. When she raised her arms, the flesh that hung from her upper arms looked to me like the dough she was kneading. It was as if she were making delicious food from her own body.

Her face was also very pale, except for the matched spots of rouge on her cheeks and the red lipstick she always wore, even on a Saturday morning.

After I washed up (“warshed” was how she pronounced the word), Mom Mom would dig her hands into the big bowl and pull out a lump of warm dough. She’d dust flour on the enamel-coated kitchen tabletop and plop the dough in front of me, reminding me to stick my hands in the flour bag before I began kneading the dough into shape.

The dough started off all gooey and finger-sticky. But as I played with it, rolled it around in my hands, it developed a skin of its own. It got all smooth and ate up the sticky scraps from my fingers like some kind of famished animal. Eventually, I’d get the dough into a giant fat sausage shape. Mom Mom would fit it into a well-greased bread pan and slip it under the hand towel that covered the other pans of dough that were magically rising.

We didn’t do much talking, since there was a lot to keep us busy. Who wants to talk about things like school or the weather when you’ve got your hands buried in something as warm and sweet as fresh dough?

Once, though, Mom Mom told me why she only made white bread.

Dark bread was what she had to make and eat and serve to her family when they were poor. When three of her sons – my uncles – were overseas fighting in World War II.  That was why she never made rye bread or whole wheat or pumpernickel. Dark bread was what people had to eat back then, she told me. White bread was what everybody wanted to eat but couldn’t during the war. It was the only time I ever caught a glimpse of how tough those days had been for her.

Except for its whiteness, Mom Mom’s bread wasn’t anything like the stuff you got at the store. A slice of soft store-bought flopped in your hand like a dead fish. It was perfectly smooth and the crust looked painted-on and had the taste and feel on your tongue of  burned paper.

Mom Mom’s bread was full of tiny holes and sometimes big ones. The crust was all cracked and crispy and splintery – sharp enough to give your mouth an occasional start. However good it tasted just out of the oven, it only got more so when, with all the baking finally done, Mom Mom sheared a slice off a loaf and jammed it into the toaster.

Who says you can’t improve on perfection? When that toast popped, singed at its edges from touching the toaster’s coils, it was transformed into something even more heavenly. Mom Mom would fish some Welch’s Grape Jelly out of the pantry and slather it on the golden-brown slab of toast for us both. She’d pour a tall glass of cold milk for me and a cup of fresh black coffee for herself and together we’d sit at the kitchen table and enjoy the fruits of our labors.

Mom Mom would sit across from me at the small, flour-dusted table, coffee cup in her right hand, a cigarette in her left, her head tilted to one side as she watched me eat the bread we’d just made together.

“How is it?” she’d ask.

I’d  like to report that I’d told her the truth – that I said it was the best bread I’d ever eaten in my life. That making bread with her was even better than Saturday morning cartoons. And that I loved her for treating me like a grown-up and not just a little kid.

But I was just a little kid, so all I said was “Good.”

She would smile when she heard me say that. But then, memory tells me she smiled at me all the time. I knew at some deep-down unspoken level that I was her favorite. I can only hope that she knew she was mine.

I took a lot for granted back then, including those smiles. Like any kid, I thought they’d last forever. But soon we had moved away and I saw her only on infrequent visits home and then, when I was ten years older, she was gone. I didn’t even come home to see her buried.

It’s not her voice that sometimes taunts me with this shameful knowledge; it’s my own.

Even now, some 40 years on, she makes no demands on me from the grave, as the dead sometimes do. She asks for no explanation, demands no penance. I’m sure she knows I’ll go to my own grave not understanding why I never said a final good-bye.

All I can do before now is acknowledge my debt and my love for her here. For a brief time, Mom Mom showed me what it was to be loved without question or expectation. That's all, and that's everything. Ask me to explain, to describe how it felt and I’ll tell you: being loved that way tasted exactly like toasted homemade bread covered with Welch’s Grape Jelly.

Re-posted as I sat in the living room in my bedroom slippers, sipping coffee and waiting for the bread dough to rise that my wife and our 10-year-old grandson Coleman made this evening.