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I grew up reading Herb Caen's column in the Chronicle (just left of Macy's), and so I know what his standard breakfast was: Shredded Wheat. He ate the big loaf-like kind, like my Dad did. I think Herb put bananas on his, but I'm not sure. It was cool that he mentioned his breakfast in the column, because of course you were already sharing breakfast with Herb by reading his column with the paper propped against your own cereal box, and now he was sharing his with you. Shredded Wheat was his habit, he confided. My own Shredded Wheat habit started when I started living with my husband. He's on a permanent low-fat diet due to high cholesterol, and he ate Shredded Wheat because it has no fat. He chose the smaller, bite-sized kind. So I started eating it too. Shredded Wheat, low-fat milk, with a sliced banana on top. Or strawberries, whatever was in season. Or is in season -- I'm still eating the darned things. My husband recently moved on to fruit and toast, having discovered, after all these years, that he's lactose intolerant and the milk in his Shredded Wheat was not having a beneficial effect on his digestive system (to put it politely). But I'm still here, eating my Shredded Wheat. Now, I know it's good for me but that's not why I eat it. I eat it because I eat it. I mean, I always eat it. Oh sure, when I'm on vacation it's fun to get bagels or scrambled eggs at the hotel restaurant, but then I don't feel as if I've actually eaten breakfast. I'm still hungry for my Shredded Wheat. We drove to Los Angeles last summer and stayed in a hotel with a kitchen in the room, so of course, I packed my box of Shredded Wheat. We found and bought Shredded Wheat when we were on vacation in Canada a few years back. There's no Shredded Wheat in Deutschland, so when visiting my old university town I defaulted to my habitual German breakfast: Brötchen mit Konfitüre oder Käse, vielleicht ein bißchen Wurst... Sorry, but you see, in Germany my habits are completely different. I was a different person when I lived there, and upon returning, that other person kicks in and her habits reappear. So maybe habit is partly a matter of place? Vacation spots don't count, but in places you live -- in my case, here in Los Altos or there in Göttingen -- perhaps the habits lurk. If I were to go back to the duplex where I lived with my first husband, would I return to the breakfasts I ate there -- one piece of wheat bread toast with a soft-boiled egg? Perhaps habit lives in tandem with memory, always ready to emerge when the stimulus is just right. It's like the ghost of a long-gone pet who always curled up near that sunny window, whom you still see just out of the corner of your eye when something moves or the contrast of dark and light on some object in your periphery triggers the memory: Hey! There's Maxie cat! And without thinking you lift your foot higher to step over her just like you always did. It's odd which habits are hard to break. My television habit vanished without a trace, without any withdrawal at all -- I married a man who didn't watch it, and we talk or read the newspaper or check the computer after dinner, and I never miss the damn tube. But the yellow car-spotting habit took about a year to die. I have a friend who drove a small yellow car. He lives near where I work and works near where I live, so we commute in opposite directions on the same freeways. One day I noticed a little yellow car like his driving the other way and glanced at the driver's window (yellow cars have the advantage of being unusual enough that you can see them coming in time to think "Hey, I'll look in the window") and sure enough, it was my friend. After that I used to pass the time during traffic jams looking for yellow cars. If I saw his car coming, I even tried to figure out what color shirt or jacket he was wearing as he passed. Of course, he eventually sold that car and bought a dark purple sedan, something so common in shape and color that I could never watch for it. But for at least a year after he sold that yellow car, whenever I was commuting and saw a yellow car in the opposite lanes, I would look to see if it was his. Meanwhile, I still buy my bite-sized Shredded Wheat. My mother buys it for me when I visit my parents (yeah, she wrote the book on "enabler personality"), keeping it separate from my Dad's box of the giant loaf-like Shredded Wheats, which he ate religiously with milk and jelly for breakfast until his quadruple bypass surgery and a switch to grapefruit and some kind of evil roughage drink. I get mad when my store tries to stock just Shredded Wheat n' Bran -- Bran is not a substitute for plain old Wheat -- and it's getting to where a strawberry or a peach is okay, but really, to be breakfast, you have to put a banana on the stuff. Shredded Wheat, milk, banana -- how else can you start the day? Unless you're my daughter, in which case it's got to be Cheerios or Rice Krispies. You think it's genetic? |