Oatmeal

When I was a kid, I never would've thought of eating oatmeal. Like something from a vanished prehistoric generation! Not that we ate other cereals for breakfast, my mother was too wise to allow that (one of the things she did do right). If we'd had cereal for breakfast at all, it would've been something like Quaker Oats. But we didn't, so we didn't.

In my student days, college, grad school, the perpetual poverty of student life, I ate oatmeal for breakfast. Every day. Because it was cheap and nutritious, and mainly because it was cheap. A handful of pocket change afforded me breakfast for a month. But after I abandoned academia, I gave up on oatmeal. Couldn't stand any more to eat what I'd had to eat for all those years.

Now that I'm getting old and grey, I find that I'm eating oatmeal again for breakfast. Every day. Because it's nutritious -- I no longer worry about cheap -- and it's compatible with my various ailments and health problems. Plus, I find in my dotage that there's something about the down-to-earth prehistoric simplicity of oatmeal that has grown on me. Much to my surprise, I enjoy the taste of oatmeal. I like it. I can easily devour a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast, oatmeal laced with milled flax seed, and come up wanting more. More oatmeal.

My more youthful selves never would've believed it.