Pandemic or not, home is a Jewish bakery.

Years ago, when my kids were small, and we were in Los Angeles for Thanksgiving— at the home of my mother — my then six-year old daughter Reese asked me one morning: Was this house where you were born? Is this where you’re from?

No, honey, I said. This is Mimi’s house. I wasn’t born here exactly.

Well, where then, Mama?

I could have said I was born at Cedars Sinai Hospital, the old Cedars in Hollywood, before they tore it down and built the fancy new one, where the celebrities now line up for their births and lipos.

I also could have said I was from Edris Avenue in West Los Angeles - a cute little apartment my young parents brought me home to in 1970, me riding in a car bed, them still in love.

I could have said that I didn’t really have a home, a family home. When I was growing up, my home was wherever my mother was, and my grandmother. Now my home is where you and your brother and your Dad are.

Instead, I took her to Beverlywood Bakery.

Beverlywood Bakery is where my grandmother and I — my Bubbie— got off the public bus after shopping at the May Company department store every Saturday of my childhood. I always got a free rainbow sprinkled cookie if I was quiet while Bubbie selected her goods: challah (medium sliced), marble loaf, rye bread (thin sliced) and always, chocolate chip rolls. If you haven’t had a chocolate chip roll — especially the kind made at a Jewish bakery — stop reading this and go get one immediately. You will discover a roll of buttery, chocolate-studded pastry so delicious that, when you take a bite, all you will be able to think about is the next one. Growing up, Bubbie bought so many chocolate chip rolls, she would freeze them by the dozen. If you dared go looking for ice cubes in the middle of the night, you risked injury by frozen pastry.

Beverlywood’s pink bakery boxes decorated Bubbie’s kitchen counters and there was no ailment — physical or emotional — that their contents could not soothe.

“Some mandelbroid?” Bubbie would ask the moment I walked in the house from the elementary school and later, from college or a work day. “A chocolate chip roll?” she would offer, like it was an aspirin, an ice pack.