Green Eggs, Early Mornings

I knew it was time to get up when I heard the bacon sizzle as it hit the pan.

Shaking of the dusty dreams of the night, I emerged from my bedroom into the kitchen where my mother was already in full force.

5 A.M.

The kitchen smells of bacon, but that is only the beginning of my mom's breakfast concoction. The eggs, mounds of them, were already filling one side of a roaster, the other side filling with bacon. In a second roaster my mom was cutting up cheese and mixing it in to a giant batch of hash brown potatoes.

This was my Tuesday mornings growing up. The early mornings, the smell of breakfast. Standing and mixing the scrambled eggs so they don't turn green, and always mom.

Mom is an interesting lady.

She is a worrier, the type of lady that always thought its better to say something twice, or twenty times to make sure the message sticks. She is a teacher at heart--that wanting to make sure her children (and others) knew the values of life. She was, in a nutshell, always teaching.

We used to call that nagging.

Tuesday morning was a day for the two of us, mom and I. The rest of the family stayed sleeping while she fried bacon and I stirred the eggs--because who wants to eat green eggs?

Sometimes I never ate a single slice of that bacon.

The breakfast wasn't for us, it was for a group of community leaders. This waking early once a week was one of the several odd jobs my mom took to help keep the family financed. She baked cakes, she substitute taught, and many other things. My favorite was Tuesday mornings.

For all of my mom's teaching and nagging and all of those other things--nothing taught me more than stirring eggs so they don't turn green. I learned what it meant to serve, to work hard, to provide. I also learned how to teach, allowing others to join me in the kitchen, stir the eggs, and see the value of a job well done.



And to this day nothing reminds me of home more than the sound of sizzling bacon.