By Vicki Hughes      Posted March 26, 2013

I am not a morning person. Actually I’m a leave-me-alone-in-the-morning person. Firstly, I don’t have the verbal skills or the listening skills prior to a minimum of two cups of coffee to carry on any appreciable conversation. If it’s pre-dawn morning we’re talking about, and we are not leaving on a very exciting vacation, I sound like a grunting grizzly she-bear. It’s best to give me time.

I do most of my writing in the morning, which may seem strange, but I started the habit and I think it works well because I can tap into that creative right-brain more easily when I start out semi-conscious. It’s sort of like how you can figure out how to end world hunger and balance the national budget just as you’re falling asleep, but can never remember in the morning. My semi-conscious brain can get a lot done when I get out of the way. Mornings, in my mind, are very personal. I’m not fit for public display, conversation or anything much, other than shooing the dogs out of my chair as I return from getting a coffee refill.

I’m definitely not a breakfast person. I think it comes from my childhood school anxiety days. I’d wake up, freaked out about going to school, eat a well balanced breakfast, and puke it up at the bus stop. After that became a reliable trend, I was encouraged to have a Carnation Instant Breakfast shake, which I have to admit is much easier to throw up on people’s Keds while waiting for the bus, but won’t win you many friends. Barfing to the smell of school bus diesel fumes is no way to start your day. Momma always worried that I wasn’t getting a nutritious breakfast. But I was, I just couldn’t hold onto it.

In the seventies, California public schools started offering breakfast to kids before school. After scrambled eggs and toast, and Carnation Instant Breakfasts had failed, we tried this new approach. The logic was, maybe I was eating too early. Maybe postponing food till later in the morning, after I got to school would be the solution.

if you have a breakfast-averse stomach, guess what you don’t want to smell on an institutional scale, upon arrival to school, which gives you anxiety? Breakfast. No. Just no.

Looking back, I wish I’d had the foresight to invest all the breakfast money my folks gave me, into something with some decent compound interest. Maybe a nice mutual fund. Unfortunately, I blew it all on Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers, K-Tel Records and candy necklaces at the ball fields on weekends. You live and learn.

I learned not to eat breakfast, or anything more solid than coffee until at least eleven a.m. I barely have the stomach for toothpaste before then, but I power through for you. Coffee breath has to be dealt with. If you and I ever go on a trip together, and we are choosing a hotel, the free Continental breakfast will not sway me. However, you can get my attention with some complimentary wine in the evenings. Just so you know.

© Vicki Hughes 2013