My grade-two teacher Miss Dowd taped a chart to the blackboard extolling the benefits of a healthy breakfast. One of the recommended meals was bacon and eggs, something I’d never eaten. For breakfast, my Sicilian immigrant mother usually whipped me an egg yolk with sugar in a cup, topping it with hot espresso. After I hounded her for days to cook me a “healthy breakfast,” one morning my mother conceded. She fried me four rashers of bacon and two eggs. The bacon—burned but somehow raw—and the runny, slimy eggs disagreed with me so violently I missed a week of school.
Salvatore Difalco lives in Toronto, Canada.