My family ate breakfast together as a formal meal. I was a senior in high school before I found out that this was not a universal practice.
My father got up first, set the table, cooked a little, put out the food and at some point called out a sing-song “coffee’s ready” up the stairs. Then we all gathered at the table, my mother usually still in her housecoat, and ate. We often had soft boiled eggs, which actually varied from almost raw to completely hard boiled because, as I may have mentioned, my father had no sense of time. Sometimes he made oatmeal, also presented on a variable scale from so thick it didn’t cook right to so runny the butter melted into soup on top. And always there was toast.
The toaster sat on the table or on a small cart. It provided for a mild bone of contention between my parents because Papa would study it with a critical eye, criticizing the proportions, the balance of the working parts, the colors, the functionality of the design, the length of the cord. Unlike his children, who could do no wrong (well, I do remember a spanking related to merciless pestering during a nap), no toaster could meet his standards of design. His speeches about the toaster exasperated my mother who would tell him to go out and buy another toaster if he didn’t like this one. But they stayed on the table until they caught fire, burned out an element or otherwise ceased to make toast. Then my father would be dispatched to the store to get another toaster, one he liked this time. Since he hated shopping, he probably spent about 35 seconds selecting the new toaster. Then the cycle started over.
Of course we had other breakfast conversation. My father was a big fan of Martin Gardener and, after carefully studying his columns in Scientific American, would discuss with us things like the logical mystery of getting a goose, a fox and a sack of corn safely across a river when only one of the three could be transported in the little boat. Or the innkeeper who managed to fit all ten men in his nine rooms by cleverly moving them around from room to room. There was one we never did figure out as children, one that involved three men staying in a hotel, paying thirty dollars, but when the money for some sort of refund was dispensed there was only $27 dollars so the innkeeper got a little extra. Something like that. We even had Zeno’s paradox served up with the grapefruit. It’s not particularly surprising that I ended up studying abstract mathematics, a connection I didn’t make until just a few years ago.
My mother told me years later, “You know, it was your father who insisted on breakfast as a meal and he absolutely insisted on my company. I was ready to get on with the day and could have skipped it.” To assuage her restlessness, she often brought knitting or sewing to breakfast. After we were grown, and certainly after she had taken to going downtown to the office with my father every day, she would sometimes leave to catch a train before he got up from the table because he loved to extend breakfast and she had given up discussing it with him. He always seemed completely taken by surprise by her departure and would grab his briefcase to hurry down the street after her. His comment on this was, “yes, but when she gets to the office, the first thing she does is sit at her desk and read the entire newspaper.”
We had breakfast as a family on Saturdays due to the fact that my dad worked in NYC and commuted by train. But he made the best pancakes and we loved it when he cooked for us. What a great story you have here! Abstract mathematics?! You have my undying admiration!!
This is wonderful and makes me feel like I was there. We sometimes had this but my Dad worked Shifts, so some mornings he was just getting home as we were going to school. In the summer we would visit a pair of great-uncles, brothers who ran a Dairy, and they got up to milk cos and feed animals at 4 AM and then came back and took a nap, and after my great-grandma made breakfast she woke them and we all ate, hard boiled eggs and Dried beef gravy on toast and cornflakes and coffee
September 16th, 2014
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