Winter Saturday mornings. Dark roast Community Coffee brewed and ready. Milk, raisins and chopped walnuts on the table. Steel-cut oats, fragrant with cinnamon, bubbling on the stove.
I anticipate the first warm spoonful, its chewy texture so different from the rolled oats slime I hated as a child.
I ate a lot of oatmeal for breakfast growing up. It was much less expensive than more processed cereals like Cheerios. Maybe we were an oatmeal family because each Crystal Oats box contained a piece of forest green pressed glass — an incentive to purchase more, an adult version of the kid prizes found in sugary cereals. My sister hauled boxloads of that green glassware to second-hand and antique shops when she cleaned out my parents’ house.
I thought rolled oats were dreadful. Every day it sat in front of me, a slimy, coagulated, paste-colored glob in a little green bowl. Sprinkling sugar and cinnamon on top did not improve the taste and mixing in diced apples and walnut chips did not disguise the texture.
Daddy came to the breakfast table dressed in an ironed, matched set of twill work shirts and pants, ate quickly and left for work. My older sister ate her oatmeal quickly, too, and was off to school, books in hand, her perfectly shaped finger curls tied back from her face with a red plaid ribbon. Mother didn’t have to tell her that children were starving in China to get her to eat her breakfast.
The cold oats still sat in front of me, a film of starch forming over the top. Mother washed the dishes, straightened the kitchen and swept the floor. “Finish your breakfast, NOW. You have five minutes; I’m setting the timer.”
I dawdled, moving the slime a little with my spoon, knowing if I put it in my mouth, I would gag.
An idea popped into my preschool mind. Without considering the moral issues involved, my eyes searched the kitchen for a hiding place. Mother would see the oats in the garbage. I couldn’t put them in the sink, they would clog the drain. I couldn’t throw them outside; she would hear the back door open. But there was another exit from the kitchen — the door to the basement steps — and it was open.
Quick as lightning, I grabbed the bowl and bolted to the basement where neatly labeled and dated glass jars filled with tomatoes, green beans, peaches, jellies and jams from our garden lined the walls. In a little room to the left was the furnace and a pile of coal to heat the house in winter. Right under the stairs was a sink, the wringer washer and the two big tubs where we rinsed the clothes on Mondays. A short wall separated the laundry area from the space Daddy used when he came in from work really dirty. On the other side of the wall was a sink with a small rectangular mirror over it, a little shelf with gritty Lava soap in a green glass bowl and a straight-edged razor folded into a hard white protective case. A leather razor strop occasionally used to administer justice to my young bottom hung from a nail in the wall. There was also a dank shower with a drain in the floor and a stained toilet. If I could flush that oatmeal down the toilet, nobody would ever know. I pushed the cereal out with my finger and flushed the toilet, hoping it would disappear on the first flush. It did. I dashed back upstairs, quietly sat down at my place at the table, licked the evidence from my oatmeal flavored finger and drank my milk.
The timer on the stove dinged. Mother came to the kitchen, saw my empty bowl and hugged me. “I knew you could do it, sweetheart. That wasn’t so bad now, was it?”
I didn’t get caught that time, but the guilt and fear from my action was worse than the taste of the oatmeal itself. If Mother knew what I’d done, she never said a word, but other cooked cereals like Malt-o-Meal and Cream of Wheat entered our breakfast rotation.
Many years later, when Mother had dementia and was living with my husband and me in Baton Rouge, she looked at a bowl of oatmeal I served her and said, “This is a big mess of cereal. It doesn’t look appetizing. Do I have to eat it?”
“Absolutely not,” I answered, and prepared her a piece of cinnamon toast.
A leisurely hot cup of coffee, the nubby, chewy texture of steel-cut oats, and memories — all pieces of a lovely Saturday morning.
—Versa Stickle lives in Baton Rouge
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Human Condition: Memories of slimy oatmeal and the green glass dishes that came with it - The Advocate
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