Breakfast with Beatles

Back in my hometown there was a radio station that dedicated itself to Beatles music on Sunday mornings. Maybe it was just an hour long show—maybe two—but through a child’s lenses, it felt as though it lasted an eternity, or at least the length of a full morning.

Growing up, Sundays were for visiting Grandma. We went to her house post-lunch for an afternoon of playing cards and drinking sodas, followed by a family dinner. More often than not, it was my favorite day of the week.

For some period of years that didn’t start until late elementary school or middle school, and that ended without my noticing (probably after I started sleeping in on Sundays until eleven or noon), we listened to The Beatles.

I remember the smell of pancake batter cooking over a skillet. My father stood poised over them. We never really ate pancakes all together, but rather in an imperfect rotation. Hot off the stove, onto plates, doused in syrup--my mother drizzled hers, my father soaked his. Two pancakes for my sister, then two for me, then two for Mom, sometimes a second round for each of us if there was enough to go around. All of this against a backdrop of Beatles. I remember “Obla Di Obla Da,” “When I’m Sixty-Four,” and “Yellow Submarine.” The silly Beatles songs. But there must have been some ballads, too.

Sometime in my mid-twenties, in-between relationships, a little nostalgic for these years gone by, and settling into waking up earlier not out of obligation, but out of habit, I would listen to these songs again while I made my own pancakes. “In My Life”--a song my grandmother called her favorite, that still always reminds me of her. “I Am The Walrus,” which I still remember my mother introducing to me later in my childhood musical education as a selection from the weird Beatles catalog. “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band” and “ “With A Little Help From My Friends” the opening tracks of the Sgt. Pepper album, the first Beatles album that I experienced in its entirety; the audio cassette I ferreted from the living room collection into my private stash of music so that it would always be accessible to me, so that I could claim some ownership over it because, at the time, it felt as though that mattered. “I Will” and “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away”--these were the Beatles songs that grew into my favorites as the band’s sound came to represent to me much more than the silly fun of a Sunday morning, but rather an amalgamation of beauty and love and loss and nostalgia and recognizing that all of these sensations bound together represent something fundamentally good.

I recall a weekend my mother came to visit me in Baltimore. I meant to take her to one of my favorite restaurants in my neighborhood—The Golden West Café—for Sunday morning breakfast, but on scanning the menu online, we discovered that every option that might appeal to her was also soaked in egg. She had, at middle age, developed an egg allergy. So we stayed put. I ran out to the store to buy a box of pancake mix and made breakfast for the both of us.

I don’t know if she caught it when I hummed “Yesterday” as I turned over one pancake and the let raw side begin to sizzle. It was good a Sunday morning.