Cinnamon Toast

         Apart from chocolate, nothing says love quite like cinnamon.  The aroma alone warms the heart, and mothers in our family have known this for years.  My grandmother expressed her love with fragrant gooey cinnamon rolls.  My mother pampered us with flakey buttery cinnamon piecrust.  And me?  I was the proud Queen of Cinnamon Toast when my boys were growing up.

         School day breakfasts were a fast and easy cereal smorgasbord – assorted cereal boxes lined up on the kitchen counter for the boys to choose from.  Cheerios, Kix, Crispix and Rice Krispies were favorites, and the boys poured at will into big wooden salad bowls, depending on what they had a taste for that day.  They washed the cereal down with giant glasses of orange juice.  One kid liked lots of pulp – the other hated pulp.  I made sure to have both kinds on hand. 

The one constant was cinnamon toast served on small green melamine plates, and I was the only one who could make it right.  At least that’s the line they fed me.  There’s no big secret to it, I used to tell them, but they wouldn’t buy it.  They wanted Mom’s cinnamon toast, not just any cinnamon toast. 

 I believe I could actually mark their growth by my cinnamon toast production levels.  When they were small I could get by with a couple of slices each.  But as they grew, so did the stacks of cinnamon toast until the two green plates looked like they would buckle under the pressure of the toast towers they held.

It wasn’t there long, though.  Those boys could power through that toast like nobody’s business.  They’d pull their stools up to the kitchen counter, pour and slurp their cereal and milk, guzzle the O.J. and inhale the toast.  Then they were out the door and off to school.  In their wake were bowls puddled with leftover milk, empty juice glasses and green plates glistening with cinnamon sugar.  Popping a finger full of cinnamon sugar in my mouth, I’d clean up the kitchen with a sense of satisfaction that I’d properly carried out my motherly duties.

Sometime during high school the toast production reached a point of diminishing returns, however.  I discovered this after a few days of seeing toast left on the plates, not just crumbs and cinnamon sugar, but whole slices of toast.  I guess like all things, there is a cyclical nature to cinnamon toast consumption.

At first I took it personally.  Was I slipping as Queen of Cinnamon Toast? Had I lost my touch?  Maybe, like a mother who asks too many questions of her teenager, I’d gone overboard with my toasting, overestimated their capacity.  I cut back, relieved the green plates of their burden.  But I found it strange that as my boys grew into young men, they needed less cinnamon toast, not more.  Maybe, I realized sadly, they just didn’t need as much of Mom’s toast.  Or Mom, for that matter.

I still have the green plates, but I haven’t made cinnamon toast in years.  Once the boys were out of the house, the toasting stopped, and we all moved on.  Researching for a writing project, I asked them recently what they remembered about breakfast when they were growing up, expecting them to mention the pancakes or French toast or omelets we’d have on weekends. 

“Cinnamon toast on little green plates!” they both said.  “That was the best part of breakfast.”

“Do you ever make it, since you like it so much?” I asked.

 “No,” they said.  “That’s a Mom thing.  You’re the only one who can make good cinnamon toast.”

And I smiled, feeling like all that toasting had just paid a huge unexpected dividend.  My heart was warm with cinnamon love.

 

Copyright Liz Zuercher 2009