I should have known that taking a vacation would make my position more precarious. The company I was working for at the time didn’t like it when I’d taken time off in the past. Once, I even quit when they insisted I come in on my day off. I had already made plans for a camping trip with friends, and I still vividly remember telling the store manager to “fuck off” over the phone when he demanded I come in to cover another employee’s shift. I rarely asked for days off and hardly ever called in sick. I was reluctant to surrender even one free day to someone else, regardless of their reason for calling out. I quit the job then and there, and it was a year before I returned to ask for it back.

To my relief, they took me back at the bagel bakery, and by then, the manager I had told off had moved on. About a year into my return, though, I decided to take a vacation to Montreal. This was the first trip I’d planned solely around my own interests. At the time, I was obsessed with the lore of Canadian bagel culture. Who were the pioneers who first brought these dense, chewy rings of dough to Canada? Montreal was the obvious place to start my pilgrimage.

What I found was that sometimes, as you delve into the history of a craft, you realize you’ve arrived too late to witness its glory days. Bagel-making felt like an art on the edge of extinction, like a knightly code or a samurai tradition, slowly eroded by automation and mechanical repetition. The image of the bagel baker as a kind of warrior-hero—working with speed, precision, and muscle—was a relic of the past. No man could compete with the machines that now shaped and boiled dough with clinical efficiency. Yet, in Montreal, the French-Canadian spirit seemed determined to preserve this craft as a living relic, an act of resistance against mass production and a tribute to authenticity.

Walking along the streets of Montreal, I could feel the city’s pride in its bagel heritage. The smell of wood-fired ovens and the sight of bagel-makers rolling and boiling by hand gave a glimpse of a ritual almost forgotten in most places. Here, the bagel was not just food but a symbol—a reminder that something as simple as a breakfast staple could contain within it a history, a culture, and a sense of place.

It was while I was there, in the bustling, tightly packed streets of Montreal, that I began to hear murmurs about an illness spreading rapidly overseas. Covid-19 was a distant whisper at the time, something that seemed unlikely to reach us, let alone turn our world upside down. I had no idea that the ground beneath my feet would soon shift. The life I had taken for granted, with its routines, certainties, and even that difficult job at the bakery, was far more fragile than I realized.

Looking back, it feels like a foreshadowing. In my search for the lost art of bagel-making, I hadn’t realized I was also glimpsing something about the nature of permanence—or the lack of it. Montreal’s dedication to preserving tradition in the face of relentless change took on a new, personal significance. All the things I’d assumed were permanent—work, stability, even the normalcy of walking through a crowded city—would soon reveal themselves to be fleeting.