The Times, Chopin Playing in the Next Room and Kindness for Breakfast – By Carmelene Melanie Siani

My husband and I don’t usually go out on the weekends.

We sleep in and take naps or will go to the gym or yoga. He makes Sunday morning breakfast and serves his specialty, Tofu Scramble.

In reality however, he serves much more than that.

“My secret ingredient is Chinese Red Pepper Sauce,”

he says about the tofu, as if he’s letting me in on something I don’t already know.

Along with the tofu he serves toast with orange marmalade imported from Turkey and I tell him

“Boy, they really know how to make orange marmalade in Turkey,”

and he smiles and pours my coffee which he makes in the French press he’s had since before we met.

There’s always about an inch of half-and-half waiting in a little glass right next to my cup and saucer.

“Gotta get my baby her half-and-half”

he said when he put it out the first time.

It’s the dearest thing, that little glass with the half-and-half in it.

We eat breakfast on the patio, rain or shine. He has it set up with misters for the 110 degree summers and a gas heater for the desert winters. He puts what he calls breakfast music on the stereo — classical mostly — which is entirely unrecognizable to me except for its somehow quiet way of sounding like Chopin himself is sitting at the keyboard in the next room.

The Sunday Times waits on the table, it being the only day of the week he reads the paper version. He folds it the way they do on the subways in New York, he told me, so as not to crowd the guy next to you.

In my mind’s eye I look at him.

“What?” he says.

I tell him that it is like a poem to me to see him there, leaning back in his chair on the patio, his long legs crossed, the coffee half gone, the plates cleared, while he disappears behind the pages of the Times.

On the table next to my coffee stands the little glass with the half-and-half. I am moved by its simplicity — it’s stark whiteness — and have the absurd thought that it’s not merely half-and-half that my husband pours into that glass for me every Sunday morning.

It’s kindness.

It’s so much kindness in fact, that in my imagination I am able to jump right into that little glass and swim in its ever-so-white creaminess for nothing less than an eternity.

Author Bio:

Carmelene writes stories from every day life and how life itself offers lessons to help us grow, expand, and put our feet on higher ground.