California Breakfasts

It was on Sundays that I woke to the warm sun and blue sky. It was Sunday that was different from all the rest, because it held a certain feeling of contentment that now is hard to find. My room was small, but so was I, so the space was a world to me�"a world in which my creative childlike mind roamed free. My white metal bed swirled and dipped in precocious patterns that look fuzzy in my head, but I knew them to be clear and cold to the touch. It was from this bed I arose, and out to my backyard I looked every Sunday.

My mother was a sleepy person. Her sleep schedule was haphazard at best, and oftentimes I think she enjoys the soft embrace of sleep more than the cold bite of living. On Sundays, my mother would stay in her blessed embrace of sleep, enclosed in her stifling room that she often forced me into�"because I loved her, I stayed and snuggled with her when she needed me. This Sunday was my day off from my mother. It was a special day, as it was every week, because it was the day my father would take me up the street to get donuts, or groceries to make pancakes. My father was the authority figure. Where I saw my mother as a best friend, I saw my father as the leader, the end all be all that I had to be good enough for. More often than not I felt I wasn’t good enough. Being graced with his special and unforgiving attention, I shone with happiness, because he was my dad and the greatest man in the world, and was he ever so much taller than me. During walks he would get so far ahead, his big long legs crossing valleys and mountains before me, and I would struggle and struggle to keep up.

“Slow down!” I’d say, “Daddy you’re walking too fast!”

So then he’d stop, and put his hands on his hips, and lean his head down, and when I finally caught up he’d rub my head or look at me adoringly and say, “It’s good for you, builds character.”

And over and over again the pattern would be repeated.

So we walked that Sunday, and here I combine every good Sunday into one, because memories are fuzzy and made of liquid that meshes together.

It was warm, and it felt like Easter, like a holy day, because it was so special to be with my dad. It was happiness unbridled, and often a challenge, because his mind was so great and my mind so little. I tried with the utmost might to impress him, and it was exuberance when I got him to laugh at one of my jokes, or be interested in my thoughts. His laugh or interest wasn’t a passing thing�"it was equal to a god’s, a great philosopher’s, a talented artist’s opinion. He was Einstein and Van Gogh and Plato and Stephen Hawking and Mondrian and Kant and every great man there ever was all rolled into one. I couldn’t fathom the swirling patterns of his mind when mine were so singular and preciously new.

I skip ahead to the man-made lake that I often glanced at with longing, for there were fake rocks along the edges that were climbable wonderlands. Today wasn’t a day for that though. We trudged along. It was warm.

The grocery store always felt cold and it smelled like linoleum and processed foods; not an unpleasant smell but a very distinct one. Pancake mix was in his hand, then in the basket. Eggs, milk, syrup? Do we have syrup?

“I don’t know,” I said. The other day I had sat on the kitchen floor and drank straight from the syrup bottle. Aunt Jemima wouldn't tell so neither would I.

“we’ll get syrup.” Aunt Jemima landed in the basket facing me, her plastic face smiling big. Through the cash register and back down the street, this time with plastic bags holding our magic breakfast. My stomach was grumbling. My house I remember to be the sweetest stucco-terra-cotta-roofed house on the street. It was an apex design where my parent’s bedroom sat, and in that apex there was a bird’s nest that filled with chirping baby birds every spring, or summer. It was chirping loudly as we got home, and I hoped it wouldn't wake my mother up. My house sat at the foot of Saddle-back Mountain, not necessarily at the foot, but much of my childhood was conducted with the big hunk of land and rock and trees watching carefully over us, adding beauty to our blue skies. I could see the rivulets cut into the mountain’s side as we entered the house.

The entrance was split in two�"one way was up, the other forward. We went forward into the kitchen. This kitchen was where the magic happened. It was beautiful, smell-good kind of magic, with lots of steam and peppers and potatoes and pancakes flying every which way. I stayed out of the way, because I could not cook and whenever I tried to help my dad cook, there happened to emanate from him lots of disappointed sighs. I hated the disappointed sighs.

From my swing in the backyard, which hung from the wooden veranda, I watched my dad cook breakfast. I swung happily back and forth, the wooden criss-crossing planks flying toward me and away from me. Everything was yellow and beautiful, and wrapped in a soft kiss of happiness. This kiss I haven’t felt in years, because it was the happy bliss of childhood innocence.

On these sunny Sundays, there were no bad things in the world. Everything was blue skies, warm winds and palm trees. Everything was pancakes, syrup and my dad’s love.

It wasn’t so much a day as it was a special sort of forgiveness�"for everything done in the week past was forgotten, and rubbed new. And that forgiven childhood me will forever stay swinging in the back of mind; the wooden veranda, my father cooking, the painted concrete, and my feet flying across the universe.