The Most Important Meal of the Day

          I’m a breakfast eater.  It’s a habit instilled by my mother, a woman who knew that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.  Though I am now a disciple of the morning meal, that wasn’t always the case.  As a sleep craving teenager, I would have eschewed eating at the crack of dawn if were it not for the various tortures my mother employed to roust me out of bed.  First, from the bottom of the steps, she called.  When I refused to rise, she mounted the stairs.  Now, with a glass of water in hand, mother delivered her second request to get up.  When I refused, and I always refused, she dipped her hand into the glass and flicked cold water at my face.  She was unrelenting.  It was easier to eat than to deal with a watery extra ten minutes in the sack.
     Eighteen years of indoctrination did the trick.  When I went off to college, I made time for breakfast.  Unlike home, where the menu might be oatmeal today and eggs tomorrow, the dining hall served oatmeal and eggs every day.  And French toast and assorted cold cereals and Danish.  I could have a side of Danish with any breakfast choice or consume a breakfast of Danish alone.  This truly was the best meal of the day.

     When the days of my mother and the dining hall preparing my meals ended, my commitment to breakfast did not falter.  My morning bill of fare expanded beyond traditional breakfast foods.  I still hated getting out of bed, but the thought of something scrumptious to eat lured me to the kitchen.  It might be a left over slice of pizza with everything on it or the microwaved contents of a doggie bag.  Anything qualified as breakfast.

     I looked into the refrigerator this morning.  I saw sesame chicken, no rice, left over from Chinese take out.  I decided to make a pot of rice.  I could finish the left over Chinese chicken with this rice.  Within a few days, I could use the extra rice as a side dish with some American chicken.  The rice was cooked perfectly.  I reheated the sesame chicken and combined the two.  I decided to eat while working at the cluttered computer area in my kitchen.  Bad idea.  While simultaneously viewing a web page and bearing down with a fork on an oversized chunk of chicken, my plate flopped off the edge of the desk and crashed to the floor. 

     I always wanted and recently got ceramic tile floors.  They are kid proof and dog proof and, as I was about to learn, Chinese food proof.  As a kid, I thought ceramic tile was the greatest thing.  I slid around on it in my stocking feet, pretending to be Peggy Fleming.  Today, as I watched my plate fly across the floor with the speed of a hockey puck, the skating fantasy vaporized.  These floors aren’t like an ice rink.  They are like a billiard table.  First comes the break, then the flying off in fifteen different directions.  As the shards of my plate traveled, they lost their load of rice, chicken, and broccoli.  The pieces moved with so much momentum that they ricocheted off the island and cabinet bases.  The result was a distribution throughout the kitchen with some infiltration into the dining room.  Rice has amazing adhesive qualities.  I found it clinging to my pajama legs and my ankles.

     But, as I said, ceramic tile is disaster proof.  There were no cuts as there might have been in the days of vinyl flooring.  There was no soaking into the cracks as there would have been with wood floors.  All I had to do was scrape it up and mop.

     Besides teaching me the importance of breakfast, my mother instilled my belief that everything happens for a reason.  The kitchen was due for cleaning.  Now it’s spic and span.  The PJ's were due for laundering.  The sesame chicken could have reached it’s expiration date, so I might have avoided a bout of intestinal distress. 

     Now, what’s for breakfast?