Christopher Robin said: “What do you like doing best in the world, Pooh?”
“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best?” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called. And then he thought that being with Christopher Robin was a very good thing to do, and having Piglet near was a very friendly thing to have: and so, when he had thought it all out, he said, “What I like best in the whole world is Me and Piglet going to see You, and You saying ‘What about a little something?’ and Me saying,’ Well, I shouldn’t mind a little something, should you, Piglet,’ and it being a hummy sort of day outside, and birds singing.” ~ A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner
My favorite meal of the day is and always has been breakfast. My mother’s breakfasts, made at a time before microwave ovens and drive-through restaurants, never felt rushed, although we had school and work and a full slate of tasks ahead of us. The farm was very quiet early in the morning, and in our small house I easily heard my mother opening the refrigerator, turning on the stove, cracking eggs, whisking batter. Before I opened my eyes, my nose was tickled with scents of pancakes and eggs, or waffles and bacon, or French toast and sausage. We always ate breakfast together, at least before my brothers and I started high school. Breakfast and supper were the bookends to our days, gathering us in together between times of being apart.
When I was very young, on Sundays I walked to my grandfather’s house for a late breakfast of cold, lumpy oatmeal sprinkled with sugar and laced with fresh-from-the-cow milk, a delicacy only the two of us appreciated and no one else in my family seems to remember. Afterward we played canasta or took a drive to the east pastures or we sat together and sang songs.
Almost none of my memories have to do with eating alone or of particular food apart from the person who made it. My grandmother’s “leftovers with the gravy on top,” as a cousin called it, would win no culinary awards, but the fact that she made it and served it in her tiny kitchen with her freckled hands gave it four stars in our reviews.
Like the philosopher Pooh, we are wise to realize that our anticipation of food—and all good things—as well as our memories of it, are often even better than the thing itself. Just for a moment, imagine preparing a special dish for someone very special in your life. Think about choosing the recipe, buying the ingredients, making preparations, setting the table, sitting down together, sharing the food. The joy has already begun and will last much longer than the actual meal.
Our memories work in the same way. They last as long as we choose to hold on to them, and they are as sweet now as—maybe even sweeter than—when they occurred.
It feels like a hummy sort of day.
Adapted from a column first published in February, 2007.
