Back to breakfast

My mother's assisted care facility was a modern, attractive, spacious building -- about as non-depressing as such a facility could be.  It was located in the town where I was born and raised, about a two-hour drive from my home in Seattle.  I was able to visit her frequently.

Each time I visited, I saw a lengthy line outside the dining room -- some folks standing, some leaning on walkers, some in wheelchairs -- a line that formed as early as a half hour before the scheduled meal time.  I was always surprised.  The dining room was large, with more than enough tables for everyone.  No one needed to worry about not finding a seat.  While visiting, I'd sometimes join my mother in the dining room for meals.  The food was reasonably good -- several notches above college dormitory food -- but not so good as to create a sense of culinary excitement.

But now -- older and wiser -- I better understand the psychological forces at work, the impetus for that eager line-up.

Since retirement, I'd gotten into the habit of eating one meal a day -- alternating between breakfast and lunch -- at a semi-fast food restaurant a mile or so from my house.  The sort of place where you order at the counter, and then are served at your table.  For a caffeine junkie like me, the restaurant had the added advantage of providing pots of hot coffee from which you could refill your cup as many times as your system could handle the stimulant.

This happy routine came to an abrupt end in mid-March of last year.  All indoor eating in restaurants was ended, because of the Covid-19 pandemic.  I had to develop new routines for feeding myself, including a better thought-out grocery purchase plan.  After a couple months, indoor eating was again permitted, but with no more than 25 percent occupancy.  I blogged in June about my brave effort to enter my favorite restaurant and order a take-out hamburger, at which time I noted a few fearless customers eating inside under the revised restrictions.  But I was freaked out by the noon hour crowds, construction workers standing around the order counter, waiting for take-out. They were talking loudly, and few of them were wearing masks.

I've made no further efforts to purchase restaurant food since then.  But on February 16, I received my second Pfizer shot. Two weeks later on Tuesday, March 2, I plan to celebrate by returning for breakfast.  Carefully, I assure you.  Wearing a mask until my food is before me, and showing up at an hour when crowds will not be present.

But what's interesting is how big a deal this forthcoming breakfast feels to me.  I've been dreaming of it ever since we first learned that vaccines would be available earlier than planned.  Since I had my first shot on January 24, I've been focused on having this first breakfast, like a dog watching a can opener operating on a can of dog food.  And what is this feast I await?  Two fried eggs, a hunk of ham, too many hash browns, a couple pieces of toast.  And coffee.  A standard American breakfast.

But it isn't really the food, just as I suspect it wasn't really the food for my mother's peers in their assisted care facility.  Or any more than it was really the food (at least entirely) for the college kids who would sometimes line up a few minutes early at the dormitory dining room.  (I worked as a meal ticket checker, which sometimes involved my opening the door and bracing myself against the herd of apparently starving cattle.)

I've concluded the hunger was less for food than for a sense of satisfaction at marking the arrival of certain events during the day.  For college students, mealtime was a break from study time; and for the elderly, it was an excuse to leave their rooms and mingle with (although not always talk to)  others of similar age.  And for me, a guy retired from a job in which my time had been carefully structured -- even though I largely structured it myself -- my knowing that each day a meal awaited me at a certain hour afforded me -- absurdly, perhaps -- a certain sense of purpose that I would otherwise have lacked.

And it's been the lack of this sense of purpose that has bothered me so much this past year.  I lost not just a fixed daily mealtime, of course.  I lost planned trips, large and small.  I lost concert dates, film series dates, lecture dates.  Movies.  I lost the ability to just drive out of town for summer day hikes, although I suspect having done so would have been less risky that I feared at the time.

As so many people complain, the pandemic lock-down makes every day the same, every week the same.  "The hours pass too slowly, and the months pass too quickly," as the elderly often fret. Or, as the old soap opera once proclaimed, "Like sands through the hour glass, so pass the days of our lives." 

I've known all along that the return to gatherings in auditoriums or concert halls, or to travel on trains and planes, might still be distant.  But being able to go out for breakfast is a first step, one to which I look forward not for its own sake alone, but as a prelude to a return of many other aspects of my life that I miss.  Aspects of life loved not only for their own sake, but for this mysterious sense of structure they give to my daily existence.

And so I eagerly await Tuesday, for all these symbolic reasons.  And besides -- I love ham and eggs.