Breakfast was my idea, when I moved back to Seattle three years ago— regular get-togethers with Mom and whoever else shows up. I was hoping the breakfasts would re-connect me with Mom and the family, and that’s what happened, but it’s not a very tight connection. I wish the conversations were deeper, less superficial, but that never really happens.
It’s always me and Mom and my sister Katrina, and Katrina’s friend Adelle, who’s become my borderline friend, too. Sometimes my brothers come to breakfast, sometimes my pal Leon comes, sometimes a nephew or two shows up, but usually it’s just me and Mom and Katrina and Adelle. We sit around the table, eat eggs and sausage and drink coffee, and talk about whatever.
Wish we could talk about loves lost, the meaning of life, maybe our greatest embarrassments and disappointments and whatever dreams remain, but I’ve never yet successfully steered the conversation to any of that, and mostly I’ve given up. Instead we talk about relatives who’ve had a birthday or a hysterectomy, and reality shows, and what Katrina and Adelle heard from some wacky radio hosts yesterday morning. Et cetera, and pass the creamer please.
With Mom, the conversations are usually the same conversations as last time. She reliably asks about my cat, my ex-girlfriends, the house I live in, and my answers never vary. She needs the concept of a shared house explained, apparently, twice monthly. Yup, it’s a boarding house. Yup, my flatmates all have their own rooms, but we share the bathroom and kitchen.
After breakfast, Katrina always drives us a mile to visit my sister Hazel, who’s disabled, on hospice, and living in a nearby nursing home. Hazel can barely talk, and it’s difficult understanding her, so mostly the rest of us talk about the old days, and we sing hymns and folk songs. Hazel smiles and listens to our conversations, almost sings along with the songs. We rotate through the same dozen songs on most of these visits, but by far the top of the charts is “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” sung as a round. Cripes, I’m sick of singing that song.
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That’s the standard breakfast with my family and visit with Hazel, and today’s breakfast and visit were pretty much the same again.
It was Mom, Katrina, Adelle, and me. We drank coffee and ate breakfast and talked about my nephew’s dumb and self-inflicted legal troubles, and his new dog, and another nephew’s new dog, and my brother Clay’s latest vacation to Mehico, and my other brother Dick’s upcoming surgery, which he hopes Medicaid will pay for. Trump is making that uncertain, but still, Dick loves Trump, and so does Clay, which made me glad neither of my brothers were there for breakfast.
I ate strawberry pancakes and scrambled eggs with ham, and drank eleven coffee refills. Katrina talked about a funeral she’d gone to for an old friend’s mother, where she awkwardly discovered that her friend had become a Trumper. Adelle and I briefly talked about the horrors of Trump, and our pessimistic predictions for the future of America. Mom did not ask about any ex-girlfriends; instead she talked about her church and her pastor, and asked about my cat, and wanted me to explain again how the boarding house works. This time I turned the tables on her, and asked her to tell me how a boarding house works.
“Well, you share it with three other men, right? They each have their own bedrooms, but you all share the bathroom and kitchen, right?”
So at today’s breakfast I didn’t have to explain the boarding house, which was nice. Only had to say, “Yup.”
As shallow and repetitive as the conversations are, I enjoy the heck out of seeing everybody. We’re all old, and I have 1½ friends left alive, 2½ if Adelle counts, and I don’t see any of the friends often. In fact, my breakfast with the fam this morning was my first and only real conversation with anyone on earth, since breakfast with the fam two weeks ago.
Afterward as always, we visited Hazel, who was happy to see us. There’s precious little conversation with her, so we sang Row, Row, Row Your Boat and a medley of other standards. Row, Row, Row is Mom’s favorite, so ten minutes after we’d sang it I looked at Mom and said, “Row, row, row,” which was enough to trigger an encore performance of the song.
Singing it a second time made me giggle, so after some more conversation and a couple of hymns, I looked at Mom and said it again: “Row, row, row,” and she cheerfully started the song a third time.
When we’d finished that rendition, Adelle asked me please not to start the song again. l was sleepy and ain’t I a stinker, though, so after a few other songs I glanced at Mom, and again said, “Row, row, row.” She picked it up and started singing, “… your boat, gently down the stream,” and I sang along, laughing through the lame lyrics.
Adelle moaned, and said she was getting a “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” headache. Hazel seemed to enjoy the song, though, mouthing the words every time and trying to sing along. Katrina was a good sport until the sixth time we sang the song.
She always gives me a lift home after we’ve visited Hazel, and soon as we were all seated in the car I looked at Adelle, and she said, “Please don’t,” but I did.
“Row, row, row,” I said, and Mom immediately started singing the song, and we sang it all the way home. Well, three out of four of us sang. Adelle only looked out the window.
Katrina dropped me at my boarding house, which I share with three other men, where we each have our own rooms but share the bathroom and kitchen. I went inside, into my room, plopped onto my recliner, and texted an apology to Adelle.
“Sorry,” I typed. “The spirit of Gilbert Gottfried compels me.”
“I’m not mad,” she texted me back, “but I’m sure tired of that song. Just once next time, OK?”
I haven’t replied yet.
3/21/2025
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