I believe that the words "destiny," "fate," "fortune," and "kismet" are most meaningful when allied with the science and serendipity that place us humans in this random spot in the universe at this happy moment. I appreciate the metaphor of the creation story in Genesis, of course, but the notion that a genetic chain � one that arose from stardust woven into amino acids by a wind and a tide � eventually created me excites my sense of wonder and wins my belief. In that cursory description of my evolutionary forebears, I've obviously left out many of my planarian precursors and weird Uncle Charles, but a generous and accommodating reader will get the point. That I am the interim pinnacle of my particular evolutionary lineage (if only in my own mind) should not take anything away from the fact that the accident of all creation is every bit as wondrous as any myth or competing theory.

And evidence for that presents itself in even the small events in this life.

On a recent Friday (November 16th) just before five o'clock, in a liquid, amber light the likes of which Sempe might preserve in a drawing for a New Yorker cover, I lumbered alongside my sprightly youngest son as we climbed the hill to McCain Auditorium at the university down the street where he would spend the next thirty minutes trying to persuade his teacher � by word more than by deed, I suspect � that he'd actually practiced his violin during the preceding week. I enjoyed the idle chatter that Taylor and I tossed back and forth as in a leisurely game of catch, and I was delighted with the beauty of the soft evening we were sharing. Although I was filled with a sense of well-being, I wondered nevertheless when the weather might turn and become more typical of November here, cold and endlessly gray.

And with that prospect of foul weather in mind, I wondered where I had cached the new recipe for french bread that had come to me in a dream last winter (not words that flow from my fingertips to the keyboard easily, my friend). I decided, however, to put off the chore of trying to find the recipe until Saturday morning (or even later), and I thought no more about the recipe that evening.

I didn't think about the recipe the next morning either until accident handed it to me. I happened to check the visitor statistics for these pages (this doesn't take long, trust me) where I found a record of a visit from a server which is unfamiliar to me but which is located in a building that I drive by every working day. That visitor (referred by a Google search on "french bread") led me to a forgotten file in my archives named "bread.html" � my missing bread recipe.

The recipe had started as a log entry, but I remember that the entry had grown long enough that I decided to make a journal entry of it. For reasons that I don't remember now I had abandoned the writing, so the entry was never completed or linked. Creative difficulties with the camera, perhaps? There was no photo to accompany it. I had made too much of coincidence? Maybe, but I might be doing that now too, no?

What was lost is found, and here it is, a wonderment within a wonderment.

From Saturday, March 10, 2001

The simplest bread recipe I know is one for french bread:

• one cup of water
• three cups of flour
• 1-1/2 tsp. salt
• 2-1/2 tsp. yeast

On cold days in winter I use the bread machine to make the dough, but instead of letting the loaf bake in the machine as I would in warmer weather, I remove the risen dough from the machine when the dough cycle is complete, punch it down, knead it, and let it rise again for forty minutes before baking it for 30-35 minutes in a 425� oven on a Pyrex pie plate or a non-stick cookie tray.

I've probably made just such a loaf nearly every day since the cold weather arrived last October. It's a simple task, and baking it in the oven rather than in the machine warms the house and broadcasts the aroma of the baking loaf more thoroughly.

Late last week, however, the appearance of the dough changed for no reason that I could discover. Instead of the soft, smooth-skinned ball I expected to pull from the dough bucket, I found a dry, grainy, wrinkled clot of dough about the size and texture of a desiccated brain (I haven't seen many of those, so I'm just guessing). Taylor was less delicate, describing the dough as a crusty dingleberry (an actual word dating from 1955 according to Merriam-Webster, as I've just discovered) fallen from an elephant's wrinkled butt.

I am merely an assembler of bread ingredients. Because I know nothing of the chemistry of bread baking or the secret lives of yeastlings, I could not explain the reason for the change.

One morning this week, however, I awoke in the deep darkness of early morning to the thought that a tablespoon of sugar and an additional quarter cup of water might just take care of my elephant-butt dough problem. Not a little sugar and a bit more water; a tablespoon of sugar and a quarter cup of water.

I am a dull boy.

Curious to see if these additions to the recipe would solve the problem, I stumbled downstairs in the dark to the kitchen and began assembling the ingredients.

Eighty minutes later when the bread machine completed the dough cycle, I removed a perfect gob of dough from the bucket, kneaded it for two minutes, and set it in the pie plate atop the oven to rise. After the dough had risen for forty minutes, I baked it.

Thirty minutes later, a perfect loaf appeared. It had the same chewy crust and sturdy flesh that I'd been producing with the old recipe until something went amiss with the machine or the ingredients.

I don't know why this solution occurred to me. The proportions bear no resemblance to any other bread recipe I am accustomed to using. Nor do I know why this problem occupied me so thoroughly that its solution surfaced to rouse me from sleep.

And there you have it. There's no huge point to be made after this big windup, but that's not unlike nature, is it. Happenstance happens: I awake from a dream with a recipe, and eight months later I walk through a beautiful landscape with a child; a few hours later, somebody unknown to me but near me in Kansas types the words "french bread" into a search engine, locates my recipe, and leaves a footprint to lead me back to my bread.

Accident happens, and it's still a wonder.

Reading: A Prayer for the Dying, Stewart O'Nan

Watching: Chocolat, Leap of Faith, The Celebration, and Everybody's Fine