Breakfast Particulars

When I hear my daughter’s ring tone so early on a Saturday morning, I am expecting an emergency.  Instead, when I answer the phone, I am rewarded with a question a grandmother delights to hear.

“I fixed oatmeal for Marshall this morning, and something wasn’t right. It was as though he had certain expectations,” she says. “Is there something special you do when you eat oatmeal with Marshall every morning?”

My daughter does not like oatmeal. Or any hot cereal for that matter. But she does keep a few packets of instant oatmeal on hand. And when she made some oatmeal for Marshall this morning, he seemed to launch into a foreign ritual.

I smile.

Usually it is I who query my daughter about Marshall’s habits and preferences in order to minimize the number of his toddler tantrums when I care for him. But this fine morning, this very fine morning, my daughter is asking me.  I feel like a village elder who has waited patiently years for the tribesmen to seek him out to learn the wisdom of the ages.

“No, not really,” I reply. There is nothing particularly special about our morning bowl of oatmeal. It is just a bowl of oatmeal.

And yet . . . .

“Maybe there is,” I begin. “I do follow a bit of a routine. Maybe that’s it.”

I am a creature of habit, you see. After many, many years of eating breakfast, I have become particular. Every morning, I prepare and eat a bowl of oatmeal in a particular way. I scatter a scant handful of raisins in the bottom a particular bowl, a rimmed stoneware soup bowl with a shallow broad bottom. Then with a particular scoop, one leftover from Daniel’s utilitarian days as a Soylent liquid meal adherent,  I measure a ½ cup of oatmeal, rolled not quick, that I scatter over the raisins. I add just enough water to cover the flakes, and microwave the bowl for exactly three minutes. 

I then carry the bowl carefully by the rim, as the stoneware bottom is very hot, to a particular spot at the end of my kitchen table and place it on a placemat next to a jug of milk and a soup spoon, not a teaspoon. As I stir my oatmeal, the sound of my spoon clinking against the stoneware bowl--a sound so distinctive my son can identify it over the phone--alerts Marshall that it is time for breakfast and he comes running. By the time he has run to the silverware drawer to retrieve a teaspoon and climbed into my lap, I have pushed the oatmeal to one side of the bowl and poured milk into the other.

Then together we eat.

I cut my spoon into the oatmeal I have mounded on one side, scoop it into the milk on the other side of the bowl and then take a bite. By pouring the milk using a just-in-time method, adding only what is needed for a few bites at a time, I preserve the warmth of the oatmeal until the last bite, ensuring the perfect balance of warm oatmeal and chewy plump raisins and the coldness of the milk in every bite. 

Marshall, on the other hand, just sticks his spoon into the bowl and gets whatever he can balance on it. Sometimes he gets a huge lump of oatmeal, other times just a spoonful of milk. Sometimes he uses his other hand to pick up a raisin or two or a lump of oatmeal and place it on his spoon. Marshall’s spoon-to-mouth skills are still evolving and often some milk is lost to the placemat or either his legs or mine. When his spoon has arrived to his mouth empty a few too many times, I feed him a few spoonfuls, which he happily accepts. Sometimes, when he is not very hungry, he directs a few of his spoonfuls towards me. And if I am quick enough, I slurp up his offerings before they land on my lap.

When Marshall finds the milk in the bowl too scant, he points to the milk jug and waits for me to pour some more. And if I do not pour enough to satisfy him, he points again and says, “More.” And so we spoon and pour and eat. More often than not, when the bowl is empty, when there is no more oatmeal nor raisins, he points again at the jug and demands more milk until I pour it. I am not sure if he is still hungry, wants some more milk to drink, or is using a ploy to extend the moment. I usually pour just a bit more milk, then, leave him on the chair while I put the milk away. More than once I have caught him putting his face into the bowl to slurp up the last of the milk like a kitten.

So, yes, I guess there is something special about how we eat oatmeal together. We do have a routine. It is unusual. Crazy, perhaps. Particular, to say the least. But it is the prerogative of a grandmother to be particular. And though I have come by the particulars of my breakfast rituals on my own, they remind me of both my mother and my grandmother, for both ate hot cereal for breakfast. 

I see my mother in her later years, padding around her kitchen, retrieving from her cupboard a misshapen tin cup to carefully measure first Cream of Wheat and then water into her bowl before microwaving it. And I see my grandmother bustling at her kitchen stove quickly stirring through the steam her pot of cornmeal mush and raisins. And I see them both sitting at their kitchen tables with large tablespoons eating their steaming bowls of hot cereal with milk. The flavors of our morning porridges vary, but I come by a breakfast routine naturally.

I have not always eaten oatmeal for breakfast. As a child I ate my fair share of Alpha-Bits and Cap’n Crunch. But Marshall does not know that. He does not know that my particular routine yields the perfect ratio of warm oatmeal and chewy raisins to icy cold milk. All he knows is that he likes to eat oatmeal with me in my particular way. He does not know that next to the oatmeal in my cupboard I keep my mother’s tin cup or that in a corner of my silverware drawer, next to the spoons we use, I keep my grandmother’s engraved silver tablespoon, sorely in need of polishing. All he knows is the warmth of my lap.