Breakfast in Bed
with Tekla

If pancakes are on the menu, I know exactly what I want. And I like to know what everyone else is having too. It’s very intimate. Amongst Georgia O’Keefe’s recipe cards, written in the script they no longer teach in schools, is “Pancakes for One.” By most measures, her recipe would serve more than a lone pancake eater, but it’s nice to know she started some days tucking into a tall stack of pancakes before crossing the garden to her studio.

When I learned about those three little bears and their porridge, I was interested. But in my childhood home, a breakfast bowl was more likely to contain cereal or a house specialty: Bananas with Sugar and Cream. I’d keep the family recipe a secret, but it’s almost all there in the name. Slice a banana into a bowl and pour cream the way others use milk. Sprinkle sugar on top. No substitutions!

While I don’t always agree with Dwight Garner on the subject of breakfast—this is, after all, someone who eats biscuits “with only moderate enthusiasm”—I do like his writing on breakfast in literature. “Nicholson Baker’s miraculous The Mezzanine is among the great toast novels in our literature,” he announces, launching a subspecialty that I hope more scholars will take up. I hate when characters “eat breakfast” or a novelist uses “after breakfast,” as a jump cut when I need to know what they ate and how they ate it. I find it much more telling than whether a character is always overdressed or never remembers to close the windows when rain is forecasted.

I like to think a fiction writer would have a field day with my particular breakfasting habits. In fourth grade, for example, I’d start each day reading the front page of the New York Times at the kitchen counter over a mini frozen cheesecake. But I always come back to pancakes. The longest pancake eating stretch in my personal history occurred in college. I worked out a 3-2-1 diet that I'm still pretty proud of. Each morning at the dining hall I ate three pancakes, two hard boiled eggs, and one grapefruit.

You don’t have to be a morning person to enjoy breakfast, sometimes it’s the only thing that gets me out of bed. I see the word “lumberjack” and I’m thrilled. It’s nice to add some protein to the plate. But the phrase “breakfast served all day” is the best thing to see on a sandwich board. From Sigrid Nunez, via Garner, I learn that Susan Sontag would make a whole package of bacon and call it dinner.

In a 1944 New Yorker profile, Duke Ellington was described as a “a calm man of forty-five who laughs easily and hates to hurry.” He was a man who wouldn’t let breakfast go. On a train he nearly missed, he pulled out a pork chop he had tucked into a handkerchief at his hotel suite and used it to punctuate a point about his similarity to Bach.

Frank O’Hara had bourbon and orange juice for breakfast, then was known to call Alex Katz to ask “Did I say anything bad?” about the previous night. I sympathize with O’Hara’s shaky start to the day, but I strongly believe breakfast must come via plate or bowl. A smoothie is not breakfast, it’s a beverage.

I’ve always been very wary of people who order the breakfast parfait. I don’t know why you’d get French toast. IRL, Leonora Carrington apparently snipped her visiting guests’ hair while they slept and then cooked it in the next morning’s omelets. Now that’s a signature breakfast.

Hotels are a great place to have breakfast, preferably in bed after a little table is wheeled in with a single red rose and a starched white tablecloth. I like free stuff, so I don’t mind trekking down to the breakfast room, so long as the offerings are hot. If the jam is artisanal I’ll take a few mini jars for the road.

In Hotel, Joanna Walsh chronicles the time she reviewed hotels for a startup website while in the midst of a divorce. She sought “the comfort of strangers” and “orderly ways to be.” Sometimes she’d make it weeks at a time moving from hotel to hotel, looking for “the same big joyful con as in the movies where everyone knows that the performers, like dinner-jacketed waiters, will leave through the service entrance in to climb onto their mopeds or slouch off to the metro.”

The hotel, she argues, is a space for “those who understand performance: ghosts, actors, women” and a hotel “must understand performance well enough to create a certain amount of traction.” Hence the rose in the vase on the breakfast table. Falling asleep in that perfectly liminal space that is a hotel, I sometimes feel I could be anyone at all, if only that someone had packed their suitcase a bit better.

Back at home, breakfast in bed carries that same trace of performance. The grand gesture of the morning: pinning you in bed with a plate, coffee on the nightstand, careful for crumbs. That sweet shared knowingness. I love you and this is a tad ridiculous when the table is just in the other room. Or maybe it’s actually: I love you enough to do this ridiculous thing when the table is just in the other room.

I wouldn’t mind if my partner barged in one morning bearing one of those breakfast tray stands you can order from a catalog loaded up with a short stack and a stick of butter or seventy passion fruits and a serrated knife.

I saw a bit of myself in Gail Scott’s My Paris, wherein she chronicles a tourist’s comings and goings—her walks, meals, and moods. One day: “Eating soft bread and jam. Butter spread so thick. Leaving teethmarks in it. Wishing breakfast would never end. Returning to divan.” I’m in agreement that the most decadent thing to do after breakfast is take a nap. A divan isn’t necessary; a bed will do just fine. Then, when you wake up, it’s time to start thinking about lunch.