My alarm clock is in the shape of a bantam rooster holding a loudspeaker to its beak. It wakes me up by flapping its wings and going, “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” and singing, “When it’s apple blossom time in old Kentucky.” The face of the clock is in the body of the bird and has a crack in it. It wasn’t originally manufactured that way. The crack is courtesy of my cat Kerri the Kat, who attacked it the first day he came into the house. Not content to put a crack in the clock, Kerri the Kat also chipped one of his teeth and it cost me a thousand dollars in dental bills, for which he made absolutely no contribution. So I couldn’t afford to repair the clock. I tried to get the company to repair the clock for free, but they had gone out of business. The fellow I got on the phone snickered and said, “Their time was up.”
I’ve since put the clock on a higher shelf, and as cats are good climbers, I pinned a note on the shelf saying, NO CLIMBING! AND NO ATTACKING THE ROOSTER!
After the rooster wakes me, I like to do some vigorous exercise to limber up my body and build up an appetite. I haven’t a hope of touching my toes if I stand, so I sit on the bed and touch my toes, once, twice, six times. It’s not very difficult, and I don’t know why people make such a fuss about it.
Then it’s downstairs, my hearties, for a full and substantial breakfast. I’m not one of those who can subsist solely on black coffee, a doughnut and a cigarette. I make myself gruel. I could say porridge, I suppose, as gruel is a kind of weak porridge, but I don’t and people look at me puzzled when I say gruel, so then I explain it’s a thin porridge, and they say, “Oh,” and look at me even funnier. But I like calling it gruel.
I measure out two tablespoons of oat flour and mix it into a paste with three tablespoons of cold water, then I put it into a pot with a cup and a half of water with a pinch of salt and bring it all to a boil. I slop it into my bowl and sprinkle golden brown sugar and cinnamon on top. On even days I cut up four strawberries in three equal pieces, removing first the green tops. I like the slices of the strawberries to be of equal width, and to ensure this I have a little guillotine contraption I bought — one of those ingenious kitchen devices that batty inventors think up nowadays in hopes of making a fortune — and I put the strawberries in it. I can do two strawberries at the same time and it even makes a satisfying Whack!
For some reason my cat howls like a dog when I do this. Whack! Howl! Whack! Howl! Cock-a-doodle-doo. (Don’t be late.) What a morning.
On odd days I substitute the strawberries for twenty-three blueberries, uncut.
You may wonder why I chose twenty-three. Well, when you think about it, it’s one after twenty-two and one before twenty-four. Also, Groucho Marx died when he was eighty-six. I hope that explains that.
I add a quarter-cup of skim milk measured by my measuring cup. Of course the milk is lactose-free. I stir the mess up, and eat.
After I finish the gruel, I follow this up on odd days with half a grapefruit, and on even days, with the other half.
I have a multivitamin pill and a fish-oil pill. As I am not big on swallowing pills, I have to help them down with a cup of hot water with two tablespoons of lemon juice, a tablespoon of Canadian No. 1 pure white honey, which is actually a mix of Canadian and Argentine honeys, pasteurized, and a pinch of ginger. Stirred, not shaken.
Recently I lost the use of my bowl. I’d been very fond of that bowl and had used it 1,157 consecutive days. Which is a long time. Or to put it another way: 3.1699 years. On the bottom was an imprint with the number 126. I’ve used the combination numbers of 126 in my lottery tickets as I thought they might be some magical mysterious lucky numbers — “Shazam!” — but have never won more than ten dollars at a time.
Also the words “Souvenir of Skull Island. Made in Estados Unidos Mexicanos.” In the bottom of the bowl, there is a picture of King Kong atop the Empire State Building trying to catch biplanes. The clearer King Kong gets, the closer I am to finishing my gruel.
This is how the tragedy happened. I had just prepared my gruel when the phone rang. It was a strawberry day. My phone is an old black landline wall phone situated in the hallway. You have to go to it, it doesn’t come to you. I hurried over to the hall. Kerri stayed in the kitchen.
I found myself speaking to a nice young woman who was worried about whether I had enough insurance. When I told her I didn’t have any, she practically broke down and cried. She insisted she’d come over immediately to remedy this dire situation, and it took me a while to convince her not to do this. I even had to tell a lie. Sort of a white lie. I told her I had a doctor’s appointment and had to leave the house. All the more reason, she said, for me to get insurance. She promised she would phone me tomorrow. It was the least she could do. I told myself not to pick up the phone tomorrow. When I got off the phone, I thought for sure I would have to reheat the gruel.
I usually give Kerri the Kat a few spoons of gruel. I hadn’t had a chance to do that yet, what with the phone call, and Kerri — never famous for being patient as far as food is concerned — had gotten tired of waiting and decided to help himself. Despite my no-nonsense NO CLIMBING sign, when I came in he was on the table. He regarded me with a strawberry sticking out of his mouth. For someone who can climb trees the way Kerri can, sometimes he can be awfully clumsy. When he leaped off the table, one of his paws pressed against the edge of the bowl and it fell off the table onto the floor. And cracked.
King Kong’s head was forever separated from the rest of him.
I don’t think Kerri would do it on purpose. Not that he seemed concerned. He was busy lapping up the gruel.
But for me, the situation was of the utmost urgency. I had to secure a bowl right away, or bid a fond farewell to that morning’s breakfast. Steely-eyed Sergeant Preston had nothing on me. I immediately headed out on my mission, telling Kerri in no uncertain terms to clean up the mess while I was gone, and no buts about it. I think he was ashamed of himself because he didn’t look up but kept on eating.
I found a new bowl at a local pharmacy. They have everything in there, even medicine. This bowl has travelled over 6,500 miles all the way from the mysterious Far East. Imagine! It cost me ninety-nine cents. Well, actually $1.10 with tax. Well, actually one dollar plus ten cents in Canadian Tire money. Well, actually ninety cents, ten cents in Canadian Tire money, and five two-cent Canadian stamps.
The clerk said she was only accepting payment like that because we had gone to school together and she felt sorry for me. I don’t know what she meant by that. I vaguely remember her. She sat in front of me in public school for a while until I grabbed her leg. I thought there was a bug crawling on her leg, but it turned out to be a rip in her stocking. To make matters worse, the rip was rather high up.
It wasn’t long after I started using my new bowl that my toenails started to fall off, my left eye half-closed into a squint whenever I put on my Howdy Doody videos, and my scalp felt like I’d been scalped. On the positive side, though, my sense of smell improved. I think because the mucus in my nose melted. Horrified, I rushed to see my doctor, pushing aside some old guy who had an appointment. As soon as I explained my symptoms, my doctor said to me, “You’ll have to stop using that ninety-nine-cent bowl from the mysterious Far East.”
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