A little over a month in isolation. We’re sticking to our schedule of making the bed, exercising, working, fixing meals. Without the schedule and the variation we can make within the confines of each activity, we would be overwhelmed by the enervating sameness of quarantine. The bare walls of the apartment would close in, the sounds of bottles crashing into the bin below by a neighbor’s hand and the lumbering roar of the street sweeping machine – even the children’s laughter from the street – would fade to background noise rather than making us run to the window to see or hear what’s happening.

Breakfast.  Something we can vary! We can be inventive about, plan for, especially now during Passover, when there is no bread. We have all the time we want to execute our food ideas: This morning it’s laban on matzah with lox, orange juice, and medjool dates.  Another day, a feta from goat’s milk to make an omelette, grapefruit; another day, fruit salad…… Lunch: fried eggplant over gnocchi, refried rice and vegetables, a big salad with tuna, lettuce, sweet red peppers, carrots, celery, tomatoes, red onion….  Supper:  practically nothing, a couple dates, some cottage cheese… 

If you are on social media you see, whether it’s quarantine or not, many people giving advice about the importance of breakfast, about what to eat for breakfast, about how to vary breakfasts, or specific recipes for smoothies, eggs, oatmeal….whatever.

This morning I wondered what famous people would say about breakfast.  As a mystery writer, I like Wilke Collins’s remarks the most. His words have panache, with an edge of menace appropriate to the father of the modern British detective novel:

“We had our breakfast–whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn’t matter, you must have your breakfast.”

Collins, raised in the Victorian era, was a British novelist, playwright and short story writer who wrote The Moonstone, The Woman in White, No Name and many other works. He was also a bohemian, an opium addict, a good friend of Charles Dickens, and a sort-of bigamist. (Can a man who lives with two women but never marries them be a bigamist?) People clamored for Collins’s stories because he wrote colorful, dramatic plots, and because some of his characters behaved scandalously, which according to current standards would be tame stuff, but must have seemed wonderfully naughty to Victorian readers, who stood in line waiting for the next installment of his serially published works. 

Well, enough. Have breakfast. Eat well. Enjoy quarantine as much as you can, and, as Josh Billings said:  

 “Never work before breakfast; if you have to work before breakfast, eat your breakfast first.”