Breakfast

This morning I removed the screw holding the handle to the sauce pan I use for making scrambled eggs. The handle has a tendency to come loose. You don’t want a handle coming off in your hand when you’re cooking something. For a long time now it’s been my favorite pan for cooking scrambled eggs. I think that’s all I’ve ever cooked in it. I thought if I bought a new Philip’s head machine screw to replace it I could do a better job tightening it. But once I got the screw out and wiped it off with a paper towel it looked fine. The problem wasn’t with the screw. Something else had worn away. We’d simply have to get a new pan. That was the prudent course of action anyway since the Teflon was beginning to flake and come off. You don’t want Teflon in your stomach. I have enough problems with too much butter and keeping my cholesterol down. I don’t need a bunch of polymerized tetrafluoroethylene added to the mix of toxins already scrambled in my belly.

Breakfast is otherwise fulfilled. A piece of toast slathered with peanut butter and strawberry jam, scrambled eggs and a glass of grape juice to wash it down. I love food. I’ve grown to appreciate food more as I’ve grown older. I remember in my 20s breakfast consisted of a cigarette and a cup of coffee. I didn’t begin eating an actual breakfast of food until my early 40s, after I’d quit drinking and smoking. That was the general pattern – a sip of coffee followed by an introsepective inhalation and exhalation of smoke - but there were mornings in my 30s when I was grievously hungover yet weirdly hungry when a helping of bacon and pancakes and fried eggs sunny side up was heaven on a plate. So I’ve had a good couple of decades now of enjoying food, including breakfast. I’ve gone through a number of phases and appetites: scrambled eggs and toast, bananas and toast, bagels and toast, oatmeal and toast, doughnuts and grape juice, cinnamon rolls and coffee, always coffee, coffee has been a staple since late adolescence.

I worry about Nebraska. The flooding there this spring has been catastrophic. Roads, bridges, buildings, homes, farms and levees have been destroyed. It’s the worst flooding in anyone’s memory. The most terrible thing in my mind is the loss of livestock, pigs, chickens, cattle and calves being carried away in cold, muddy, turbulent water. The extreme cold of the winter, blizzards, subzero temperatures, strong, relentless, biting winds was bad enough. But the flooding was its own form of holocaust. I can see the panic in their eyes. I can’t imagine the horror of that.

And the early harvests were destroyed. Food prices will be astronomical this spring and summer. And then will come the wildfire smoke from the north in Canada and east in the Cascades. The planet is quickly becoming uninhabitable.

It all makes writing or painting or building look ridiculous. There’s simply no reason for it. Though I’m not sure there ever was. There are lot of things you do in life that don’t make any sense, but you do them anyway, as if you’re being carried off by an invisible, supernatural current of some sort. It’s an energy. A very goofy energy. It drives you. You could call it libidinal, there’s elements of that, it’s always generally there in one form or another getting people into trouble, but it doesn’t have an erotic vibe. It is something moving through you even in moods of despair and gloom, it expands you, dilates you, makes you feel a little lighter, a little less dead, a little more worried about dying, but not overconcerned about dying either.

I go for an annual physical. I’m early. I fill it out a short form asking questions about the state of my health (hell, I could’ve filled this thing out and mailed it in and skipped the damn physical) and sit and read Le parti pris des choses by Francis Ponge, which I stuck in my jacket before I left. I wonder if Ponge ever wrote about pans? He must have a prose poem somewhere about pans. They’re a natural. Such beautiful objects. I start fantasizing about sauce pans and butter and scrambled eggs. That first pat of butter that begins to melt and diffuse over the surface of the pan and then the eggs plopped in, the shells cracked expertly and evenly, the two halves tossed into the compost.

I read “Conception of Love in 1928,” “I doubt that true love involves desire, fervor, passion. I don’t doubt that it can: born of a disposition to approve anything, then from a friendly abandonment to chance, or to the usages of the world…,” as a young man and woman walk by. The man is pushing a pram with a newborn and the woman is walking awkwardly, her legs spaced apart as she hobbles along.  Funny how Ponge’s quiet and rather opaque reflection on love is echoed by this ongoing reproductive drama of our species, even as the climate warms and the animals die off.

The physical goes fine and I get dressed and go back into early April sunlight and drive home. I fasted for my blood draw and have for the last few days been avoiding all my favorite foods like eggs and butter so my cholesterol levels aren’t too shocking. I hate statins. All I’ve had so far today is coffee. I’m starving. I can’t wait to get some food into my body.

No new pan yet. I get the old pan out, slice a pat of butter and drop it in and watch it diffuse into transparency. Eggs always feel wonderful in the hand. What a wonderful shape. What incredible smoothness. They crack so easily. The insides glisten, goopily, into the pan, the yolks still whole, shiny, bright yellow, like something out of fairyland. I get a wooden salad fork and when the heat of the electric burner begins to make the fluidity congeal I being stirring it up into a chaos of lumpy yellow. I add two pieces of toast slathered with peanut butter and jam and pour a glass of grape juice. Breakfast.