Wordy Wednesday: Breakfast Dammit

I was fully intending to prattle on this morning more about Islam and whatever it was I was saying yesterday, and I will try to get to it more in a bit, but it will involve digging up those upsetting pictures and some sections of the bible that are rumbling round in the back of my mind, somewhere. What can I say, I am barely awake and I have a big stack of email and stuff that I didn't do earlier that I have to do now. So instead of that, I thought I would share the horrifying realization that I had this morning, as I was standing in the kitchen, after cooking up two packages of sausage, toasting and buttering a loaf of bread, scrambling two eggs and frying ten others, heating milk in a saucepan, removing the skin from the milk, pouring hot water over coffee in a cone into a little pitcher, enough for one person, making the tea, putting it all out on the table and then, as I'm pouring hot milk into six mugs ahead of the tea and coffee (for one) standing outside myself and seeing things as they really are and crying out

OH FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE!

Have I really reached the point in my life where I am giving six small children Cafe au Lait, and The au Lait, in the proportions of milk and coffee and milk and tea that you can get at the Hotel Ivoire in Abidjan? Why didn't I just dump a lot of cereal into bowls and plunk a gallon of milk on the table and tell them to go at it?

Well, I know why. Its because their grandmother heats the milk for the tea when she is here. And because their father taught one of them to drink coffee. And because I got stuck in the place of cooking up real breakfasts three mornings a week. The fourth, Elphine makes toast. The fifth and sixth Matt plunks the cereal–well, plunks is the wrong word, he carefully pours exactly as much cereal into each bowl as he knows each child will eat, precisely and exactly each time–on the table. And the seventh is cookies at church, the day of The Lord. What else are they going to eat? Sometimes its popcorn. Where was I?

Oh yes. Heating the milk. Life is full of inconsistencies and quandrums (that word's not my own invention, I got it from someone very clever). On the one hand, I let them do whatever they want and try to interact with them as little as possible outside of school hours. On the other, I heat their wretched milk. Surely there's a culture, a true home, for me somewhere. Maybe Asia? Maybe Binghamton is exactly the right place for this kind of thing.