I was a pretty tough customer as a child when it came to eating. I did not enjoy most of the ordinary viands a home in the Midwest during the middle years of the Twentieth Century provided. Anything in a can was suspect. Elbow macaroni was made of arsenic. And my own overheated imagination populated every head of iceberg lettuce with silent green grubs, awaiting the opportunity to bore into my brain pan from the roof of my mouth.
The only food fit for an eight year old boy to eat was french fries doused in ketchup and hamburgers sans any hint of mustard but smothered in dill pickle chips. And a glass of milk. Anything else was slop.
My sainted mother made sure I got a lot of slop. We fought over her culinary child abuse hammer and tongs for many a long year, but her overbearing manner made it difficult for me to put her under my hypnotic sway with the Svengali-like passes I practiced so frequently in front of the bathroom mirror. She was immune to both reason and mesmerism.
Take, for example, her rude attempt at breakfast. Everyone and their iguana knows that little boys need waffles drenched in syrup for their morning meal. My mother only made them on Sunday mornings, and she spoiled the pleasure of the whole shebang by limiting the amount of Log Cabin syrup I could drown my waffle in to a trifling quart. The rest of the week I was stuck with cracked porcelain bowls of Malt-O-Meal in the winter and Kellogg's cornflakes in the summer. Flaccid stodge of the worst kind. I eventually swore on a white and red checkered copy of Better Homes Cook Book that when I was finally emancipated from my mother's doleful attempts at nutrition I would run riot, especially when it came to breakfast.
And so I did. At age 17 I miraculously escaped to the Ringling Brothers Circus Winter Quarters in Venice, Florida, as a First of May -- a new clown. As my slender means allowed, I began patronizing the nearest IHOP up in Sarasota. Fondly do I recall glutting myself on Swedish pancakes with lingonberry syrup until it began slowly dribbling down my earlobes like pahoehoe. I haunted the innumerable greasy spoons that lined U.S. Highway 41, to sample their biscuits with sausage gravy; an oleaginous achievement guaranteed to clot the arteries of a bull moose.
And then, once the show hit the road and my finances became even more parlous, I discovered sardines in Louisiana hot sauce. A can of those babies cost a mere thirty-five cents, and there was no need for a plate or bowl -- just a cheap white plastic fork. While my fellow clowns looked on askance I would tear into at least two cans each morning, wiping the greasy chum off my chin with my sleeve.
Once the circus hit the metropolitan East Coast I became a slave to bagels, cream cheese, and gravlax. Eaten with slices of raw cucumber, it quickly became an addictive ritual that depleted my pocketbook so efficiently that I began cadging pizza crusts left over from clown alley blowouts just for sustenance. When the show moved west into the Corn Belt I had to go cold turkey in Des Moines, settling for an Iowa chop with scrambled eggs to assuage my hunger pangs.
Huevos rancheros in Texas. Avocado toast in California. Wheatgerm with goat's milk in Oregon. Cheddar bratwurst nestling on a bed of hard boiled eggs in Milwaukee. My impervious stomach welcomed them all with equanimity.
Then I married Amy, and we had her whole wheat pancakes, rain or shine, for the next fifteen years. They were good and stuck to my ribs, but as I grew older my innards relaxed their hold on the means of egress -- and whole wheat became too cathartic for me. So I switched to ramen noodles in the morning, which Amy took as a personal insult to her cooking . . .
When I was single again I relapsed back into sardines, until I moved to Thailand, where I rejoiced over their tangy rice porridge each sunrise. It's chock-a-block with chicken broth, tamarind paste, galangal root, cilantro, and a host of other exotic botanicals, with a salted duck egg diced into it. Fortified with malt vinegar, crushed peanuts, fish sauce, fermented soybeans, and a soupcon of mouse dropping chili paste, it seemed a tropical ambrosia to me -- until I developed a severe case of Bangkok belly and was restricted to a diet of rice crackers and soda water by my doctor. By the time I had recovered, my visa was permanently expired so I left the country -- never to return.
The next several years were a sorry mixture of supermarket pastries or yogurt smoothies to greet the dewy morn. My taste buds attenuated until I couldn't tell the difference between a can of Hormel's corned beef hash and a bowl of Quaker Five-Minute grits. Breakfast, it seemed, had become a lost cause.
But then, five years ago, I moved into my present abode -- Valley Villas Senior Housing, in Provo, Utah. And cater-corner to me is the Fresh Market, an independent grocery store. They sell, among other things, pig's ears, fresh tripe, pickled okra, and fresh baked jalapeno/cheddar bagels. After some trial and error I have settled on a jalapeno/cheddar bagel, toasted, with cream cheese, and a slice of gravlax -- with whole scallions on the side -- as the perfect breakfast for my declining years. It's pungent, convenient, and goes down well with a cold bottle of chocolate whole milk. The gravlax at Fresh Market is hellishly expensive, and so I don't treat myself to this perfect morning repast more than three times a week. But on the days I do indulge in this delight I find the world is a better place for a certain pudgy, flat-footed, and dreamy Norwegian scion and Siamese refugee to live in.
