September 16, 2008

Remembering breakfast on the first days of school in the fall in New Orleans. My famiy lived at 54 Fontainebleau Drive in New Orleans. •
• Breakfast in New Orleans:
The nurse/maid, Ella, made breakfast for four children. My mother slipped about drinking chicory black coffee from a demitasse cup, blue willowware. My sister and I in our upstairs-renovated attic room, raced downstairs, getting bacon sandwiches on toast, hurriedly pressed into aluminum foil. Often, Mary would say no. Aunt Roma (her three girls in the car) was out front tooting to pick us up to take us to Sacred Heart. Smells of bacon, butter, and toast. Mornings, I got up early, Ella would bring grits, bacon, eggs and toast upstairs.
Soon after, Mary and I raced out at 8:05 for 8:20 school. Ella went into the kitchen and set out Dad’s place for breakfast. He ate whenever he got up. Two pieces of fruit, a banana and an orange, dry toast, were carefully set out alongside the folded Times Picayune. The table was a mosaic of Don Quixote with a glass top and a floor to ceiling breakfast bureau on the wall of the dining room.
The kitchen had a swing door and Ella in maid’s uniform would swing in and out of the kitchen. Sometimes the door would hit you in the face if you didn’t hear help coming in from the other side.
On the stove was a cooked pound of bacon, a pot of grits, a tank of slow drip chicory coffee. The cook would make it the night before. You pour boiling water every few minutes into the top of the coffee pot and let is slowly drip. Coffee looked like black mud. It was kept in a jar in the refrigerator and watered down on the stove and heated up in a saucepan.
Sometimes, I would drink coffee with milk—milk mostly coffee in a water glass, room temperature.