Since Arlene was still in Maine, I figured I wasn’t going to make coffee and eat breakfast at home before driving back there. Since Millie and Joel were also up there, I figured that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to bring a half-dozen bagels back with me. A stop at Rosenfeld’s would get me breakfast as well as the bagels.
The guy who waited on me was the guy who bakes the bagels. I’ve seen him for years there, putting wooden boards covered with unbaked bagels in the huge rotating oven, pulling the finished bagels out on big wooden paddles, and dumping them in wire baskets behind the counter.
“You’ve been coming here for years, haven’t you,” he said. “Yes,” I said, “we’ve lived in Newton since ’76 and I’ve bought bagels here all that time,” “I started here in ’88.” he said. “I bought the place about five years ago. None of the kids of the people who founded it were interested in taking over. The only change I made was to make it kosher. Rosenfeld couldn’t make the place kosher, because since he was Jewish the rabinnical authority would have made him close it on Saturdays. Since I’m not Jewish, all I had to do was keep the food kosher.”