How does breakfast fit into your day? Think about it: do you care at all about its content? It's presentation? I ask, because for me, over the years, this meal has had a wild ride. And I wonder why. After all, it's just breakfast. And yet, I seem to have infused it with some special meaning and whole lot of emotion.
I don't remember breakfasts before moving from my grandparents' home in deeply rural Poland to my parents apartment in Warsaw. But once I relocated to Warsaw at age three, I have it firmly in my memory bank: breakfast then was at the daycare where I spent virtually all my waking hours. And it was awful. At least I thought it was awful. Milk soup with rice. That kind of thing. I hated the smell and the taste. I'm sure I hardly ate any of it.
When we moved to New York (age 7 for me), my mother was the breakfast fixer and I continued to hate the meal. She was, understandably, concerned about vitamins and such and so she insisted we start the day with half a grapefruit. Guess who hated to start the day with half a grapefruit? The cereal that followed was no better. (To this day I dont get Americans' love of flakes and crispies mushed up in cold milk.)
But in the summers, I was back at my grandmother's house and her breakfasts in my eyes then were... sublime. Oatmeal, white bortsch, bread toasted on a wood burning stove-top, ozzing with melted cheese. Or, with white cheese and a local honey. Bowls of berries, also drizzled with honey. Warm tea with fruit compote. All eaten on the verandah, with sunlight coming in on two sides. Heaven on earth!
Later, in my adult life, breakfast was a blur. Getting the kids off to school and myself off to work did me in. I dont even know what I ate. I'm sure there was a lot of coffee in the deal.
Once the kids were out of the house and I started in on my life with Ed (sounds like a TV sitcom, so? "My Life With Ed"), breakfast became important. No, make that super important. I connected to him in those early hours over morning foods. The berries from my grandmother's time returned to the table. As did the oatmeal. And of course, I added croissants. And granola for variety. I am back to this equation: breakfast = sublime pleasure.
So it is no surprise that after another too-short-a-night (Ed's cough), after feeding the animals and walking the farmette lands...
... I got in the car on this drizzly, just a degree above freezing, very misty day...
... and drove to get croissants at Madison Sourdough.
It would have been a beautiful set of minutes, except that I kept the radio on and of course in the early morning hours, NPR carries news of the day and the news was so... miserable! Such meanness we are capable of! Brutal acts with consequences to poor helpless souls all over the world. Who are we as a people? How can we do this stuff?
I came back in tears.
And so, yes, breakfast was beautiful. Delicious.
But it was tainted by the news of the day. True, it was comforting to sit across the table from Ed. But, he is already glum about it all, so he suggested maybe we put these topics on hold and talk instead about jams and other innocuous things (we have had many long and beautiful conversations about jams and other innocuous things), but this made me tear up even more because of course I'm this postwar child who was born after my country of birth endured horrors, and listening to how others are now victimized and treated with scorn and labeled as radical lunatics and worse (because they feed starving families) -- well, this just isn't going to sit well with me, because I know what this leads to, this hatred of others and I dont want to be a part of it in any way. And so this is why Ocean is a bit off course this morning: I feel compelled to write about those tears, the sadness that I have because of what so many of us, here in this country, are willing to do to others who are just trying to work hard and raise families and have a chance at a modestly okay life.
We ended breakfast with Ed reminding me that perhaps buying less right now would be a good thing. I'm not sure I entirely follow that logic, but of course, since I've been traveling so much, I'm already not in a spending mode because the retirement purse is only so big.
For the rest of the morning I lose myself in reading about far away places. Where people do good things and live good lives with open hearts and willing hands.
And in the afternoon, I pick up the two kids after school.
Mondays are ballet days for the girl and in the evening I was to drop the boy in one place, and the girl in another (for her class), but someone left her ballet things in her school cubby, so we did none of that. I didn't mind the extra time with the kids at the farmhouse: I started reading a new book to her (but he listens in, only sometimes he pretends not to) and it's another winner and honestly, there is no better way to spend a late afternoon than on the couch, with a winner book and winner kids.
For supper I cook up some eggs from our once again laying hens and now I am right back on the couch, with Ed, and this, too, is a good moment, a special moment, belonging to the very best: just him and me and the occasional cat. And a piece of chocolate to end the day.
with so much love...
