When I was in the first grade, my father would come and rouse me from slumber to dress and eat before sending me off to school, lunch box in tow. My lunch box almost always contained the same thing within: peanut butter and jelly, an apple, and a snack of some sort. This was what I toted to school nearly every day for an entire school year, and my dad made this for me unfailingly, even though he cannot stand the smell of peanut butter, because I wanted it, would eat it, and never really got tired of it.
While my father was in the kitchen, I would sit at the table eating breakfast. What I remember eating most often was instant oatmeal, stirred up from a packet with hot milk, and I loved it. The flavors would sometimes change, from apple cinnamon to maple and brown sugar and peaches and cream, all of which were delicious. Sometimes in place of instant it would be made from old-fashioned rolled oats, or plain quick oats, with a pat of brown sugar being munched while I got ready for the school day.
I remember the one morning that I decided that I wanted parmesan cheese in my oatmeal (plain oats, of course), reasoning that I liked it on spaghetti, I must enjoy it in my oatmeal, right? Well, at that age, not so much, and I have yet to try out savory oats as an adult – in my head then I don’t know that I expected oats to be salty and cheesy like that, and now, I’m not sure if I expect a bowl of oats to be savory, or sweet.
Now that I am grown, I find that oatmeal is still one of my go-to breakfasts, though now it tends to come from a big container of plain, rolled oats, and I add in my toppings and flavors myself. Sometimes it’s banana, sometimes apple cinnamon, sometimes brown sugar, but it’s always delicious. Some mornings, when I’m sitting at the table, eating a hot bowl of oats and checking my email in the morning, I still think about those early mornings before school, eating oats while my dad fixed me lunch.
