STARBUCK'S REVENGE

My mother and father did not have a marriage. They had a lifelong love affair. My father’s given name was Simeon. His friends called him “Sim” or “Si.” My mother never called him anything but “my dear Shimondel.” In turn, I never once heard my father call my mother by her birth name, Sophie. She was always, “my darling.”

My mother was far from the world’s greatest cook, so she wisely prepared basic, unadorned meals. To her great fortune, my father was a man of simple tastes whose palate was indifferent to an extraordinary recipe, much less haute cuisine. Were my mother to have made a particularly tasty dinner, my father’s highest accolade was, “Darling, this is a recipe that you can keep.”

Thus, as you can imagine, breakfast was the quintessential picture of simplicity. Each morning for 48 years of their marriage, my mother would align before him glasses of orange juice, milk and water. Before him, too, was a bowl of cornflakes and sliced bananas. He would pour half the milk in the bowl, eat the flakes, drink the remaining milk, the juice, and then the water each day in the same order.

As breakfast would end each morning for 48 years, my mother would make the same offer: “Would you care for a cup of coffee, Shimondel?” And each morning for 48 years, my father would politely respond, “No thank you, my darling.”

Slowly, my father descended into Alzheimer’s. We were finally obliged to place him in a nursing home. One morning, my mother and I arrived just as the attendant was helping him eat breakfast. He heartily ate a plate of eggs and toast. And, as you might have guessed, he concluded the meal with a robust cup of coffee.

“Shimondel,” my mother asked with loving consternation, “After all these years you started drinking coffee with breakfast?”

In his senility, she expected no response at all. Imagine our surprise as he looked up from his cup and softly announced with complete clarity, “Darling, this is a recipe that you could keep!”