Breakfast With Mark

Breakfast With Mark
By: Linda DePeel (c.)2008

I had taught my kids how to fix their own breakfasts when they were quite young. That way, if I came home tired from working all night and the sitter hadn't given them anything to eat, they could fix it themselves. They weren't allowed to use the stove or oven, but they could make toast like pros, and six-year old Mark loved scrambled eggs cooked in the microwave.

One night I called in to work, as I had a bad case of the Twenty-four Hour Flu. I was violently ill all night long. Finally, at about four a.m. the crisis passed and I fell into an exhausted sleep on the sofa in the living room. I was wide awake about two hours later--and violently ill again.

Mike had opted for toasted peanut butter sandwiches, but Mark wanted his usual scrambled eggs. Ugh! I have never been an egg fan, and to me, scrambled eggs cooking in a microwave is absolutely revolting. It just has this--rotten odor and this odor seems to permeate an entire house!

"Mark!" I could barely croak. "Not--" I couldn't finish my sentence, as a huge wave of nausea washed over me.

"They're good, Neenz!" Mark beamed at me, his huge dimples showing. "You want to try some? Maybe they would make you all better!" He started coming into the living room (we lived in a trailer), and I held up a hand. "No, no!" I cried. "Not right now, sweetheart! I'm going to lie back down again. Ooooohhhhh!" "Okay," he said, and started scarfing them down.

Twenty years later, and he still likes his scrambled eggs in the microwave. I visited him in Omaha last summer, and he proudly showed me his brand new microwave. "It even speaks Spanish!" he announced proudly. "That's why I bought it!"

"Why didn't you just take Spanish in high school when you had the chance?" I shook my head. He speaks French, German and Greek fluently, but took those courses in college.

"Well, I didn't like the teacher," he replied. "And besides, the Spanish they teach isn't the kind of Spanish spoken in the US."

"Mark, sometimes I wonder about you," I said, rolling my eyes.

"Yeah, yeah." He still has those big dimples. "But, hey! Guess what I'm fixing you for breakfast in the morning?" My stomach began to churn. I knew it was going to be scrambled eggs in the microwave--excuse me--wavels. I managed to talk him out of it.