I have often wished for a neighborhood bakery, a nice little place I can duck into on Sunday mornings after my 5 mile jog (open by 6am, of course!) to pick up a healthful bran muffin before dashing home for a quick shower and then on my way to yoga.

I see your skepticism from all the way over here.

Okay, fine. I have often wished for a neighborhood bakery, a nice little place I can slouch into Sunday around 10 am to pick up a chocolate croissant or two to take home and gorge on while splayed on the couch in front of the TV. Get Megan's pryin' bar indeed.

Probably for the best, I do not have a nice little neighborhood bakery. I don't even have a lame ass Einstein Brothers bagel place. What I have is some bakery whose name starts with an A and the word sounds sort of like Ayatollah. The Ayatollah Bakery.

I have never gone inside the Ayatollah Bakery, though I've walked past it many times. The window is full of pastries and breadish goods, and every one of them, down to the last crumb, looks dry and desiccated. Believe me, I'm from the desert, I'm an expert in dry.

Plus, to be brutally honest, it's a very Hispanic bakery with everything written in Spanish, everyone talking in Spanish, and small children babbling in Spanish, and I am one part intimidated and one part embarrassed by my lack of knowledge of the Spanish language. Everything I know comes from Sesame Street and reading the ads on the buses in Tucson (the only words I remember from the ads are trabajo [work] and embarazada [pregnant] and I thought how interesting it was that the word for pregnant was etymologically related to the English embarrassed, and I wondered if perhaps there is an additional connotation to embarazada, like "unmarried-and-pregnant" or "showed-up-at-your-quinceañara-pregnant" since it always accompanied a picture of a young girl and offered options for adoption, and I thought how interesting it was that there was a need to express all that in one word much as the Greeks had a word which expressed "killing a man by means of tossing him out of a boat" -- all in one word -- which to me implies that it happens often enough that there was demand for one word. As it turns out -- no. No extra connotation.) Anyway, my Spanish sucks.

So I avoided the place, mostly because of the dry looking pastries. But I would peer in the windows as I walked by and wondered if maybe they were holding back something yummy, maybe somewhere in the back of the shop they keep the moist, delicious pastries, saving them for the chosen few who weren't too intimidated to go in. Finally, I worked up the guts.

Hmmm. Well. If they were hiding anything good, they were hiding it well. Barely a hint of chocolate anywhere -- just some dry, aged chocolate chip cookies. It boggles my mind how this place stays in business. There was one promising sign, a name I can't remember, but the second word was coco. Coco! I thought. Maybe it mean cocoa or chocolate? I went to the counter and asked, "What is in the pastillo coco?" The lady just looked at me "What's in the what?" she asked. "The pastillo coco," I repeated, pointing across the room to it. "The what? I'm sorry, I can't understand you."

Okay, in spite of my lack of Spanish, I have to admit: I was offended. Maybe I don't speak Spanish, but I do know how to pronounce it, and I have on at least one occasion been complimented on my accent by a native speaker and asked if I am a native speaker. One tiny little compliment, and I'm all snotty about my nonexistant Spanish. But still! I don't remember the first word, but it was something easy, and it ended in -illo -- the only potentially tricky part of the word and of course I know to pronounce it with the y sound. And coco is simple. And my diction is fucking brilliant in any language. So, really, how could she possibly not have understood me? I wondered if maybe she was deaf.

Anyway, long story short, I ended up leaving with no pastries and I continue to wish for neighborhood bakery, a nice little place where they understand my Spanish. Which is way better than theirs. So nyah.