There have only been a few times in my life where I woke up to what I guess is considered the typical American breakfast. The breakfast that’s shown in commercials and ads. A glass of orange juice, a glass of milk, a bowl of cereal, scrambled eggs, bacon, grits, sausage, the full ten thousand calorie American breakfast, that supposedly all Americans have every morning. Oddly enough, I think any time that I have had the full American breakfast I have either been in a hotel, another country, or both.
I know for a fact that I never once had this type of breakfast as a child. Whatever we had came out of a box unless it was a special occasion. If that was the case we would have my mother’s famous “gristle biscuit”. “Gristle biscuit” was not a biscuit at all, but the name seemed fitting enough for an egg casserole that is burnt on the bottom and top but still raw on the inside. Yes, I complained about all the stuff that came in a box but one spoonful of “gristle biscuit” made me appreciate what I had on those non-special days.
My father did the grocery shopping for the house once, and only once, a week. Sunday. After church he would make a list, a menu he called it, except a menu implies choice and there were no choices here. He would plan out dinner for every night and whatever we needed for lunch that week, but breakfast was allowed a more democratic process. Breakfast was where he went off-script and would ask for input every now and again...until he didn’t.
I was a weird kid and for some reason, I had the notion that eating bran flakes for breakfast was a sign of sophistication. I imagine this had something to do with the fact that it was marketed solely to octogenarians. My child brain must have tied old age to sophistication and totally missed the whole “bowel regularity” bit. Either way, when my dad asked me what I wanted for breakfast I told him I wanted bran flakes.
Little did I know or understand that when I asked this question it wasn’t, “What do you want this week?” It wasn’t, “What do you want this month? It was more like, “What do you want for the next year and a half?”
After a few months of eating only bran for breakfast, my digestive tract was cleaner than a lot of microchip manufacturing facilities. At a point, I just couldn’t eat anymore. I would raise the spoon to my lips but it just wouldn't go in. I begged the old man for something different but he would reply, “got to finish what we have before I buy you something different”.
Finishing what we had would have been a fair settlement but every time he went to the store he would buy another box of bran. Over the months the new boxes just kept getting stacked by the old ones. Box after box of delicious, nutritious, quickly expiring, bran flakes. I couldn’t tell if this was torture or not, but one day my brothers and I sat down and ate every single box of bran before he could go to the store the next Sunday.
When he did his weekly inventory and noticed that all the bran was gone he simply asked us what we would like for breakfast again. Knowing good and well whatever it was we’d probably be eating for a long time we tried somethin g different. Pop-tarts. I then ate these toaster pastries from puberty until I left home. Twenty years later there was still a box in their pantry as a grim reminder of the past. Petrified. Fossilized.
I used to think that I was the only person who was exposed to this strange phenomenon of food purchasing. In excess. I figured it was just another one of those unique traumas that make me, me. I have found that other people have suffered the same fate when the groceries in their households were left up to the male figure to procure. I had a friend who had frozen pizza every night of his adolescent life because that was all his dad would buy. I had another friend that only had bologna sandwiches for lunch, for a decade.
The other day I made my son an organic blueberry waffle for breakfast. He took one look at it and started flailing about and sassing. “I can’t eat anymore of those nasty things!” Then it dawned on me as I put the box back in the freezer next to about 15 other boxes of the same exact thing, this problem my father had, I now have. I have bought a box of organic blueberry waffles every week for the past year unaware of the multitudes of other boxes that came before it. This condition is hereditary I suppose.
I’m not sure if I’m relieved to know that this particular trauma wasn’t a conscious choice on my father’s part. I need to think about that some more. I just know that I threw away all the waffles, so I hope my son likes gristle biscuits and bran flakes because that’s all he’s getting for the next few years.