A subconscious habit

I vacillate between breakfast options. Lately, I've had homemade bread available, so I've let the granola languish and I've had fruit and toast with either local honey or homemade jelly. The bread supply running low, I opted for cereal the other day and found myself serving a subconscious habit.

Almost fourteen years ago, we got our last batch of house cats, brothers Tuxedo and Pyewacket. While they were yet small kittens, we were also remodeling the kitchen. Therefore, I took my cereal breakfast in the den while I watched the morning news and while Pyewacket watched me. Wanting to bond with him, I saved the milk in my cereal bowl for him and for the next 13 years, he haunted my breakfast table.

We had to say good-bye to Pye in December. He had become thin and listless and wasn't even interested in his beloved milk. But when I was finishing my cereal bowl this week, I found myself spooning out the granola and saving the milk for him. Then I realized that wasn't necessary.

Strange how habits can become so ingrained we don't even think of them. Even the silly ones, like saving the cereal milk for the cat.

The great equalizers

I've always thought of Big Box stores as the great equalizers. If you go, no matter who you are, you shop the same merchandise and stand in the same long lines. I used to think of airport security as the same, but now that there's the Safe Traveler (it has another name) line, the wait can be cut short and said Safe Traveler is equalized with his or her equals and not the rest of us.

But I've now found another great equalizer and it has to do with why I've been absent from this blog: a hospital surgery waiting area. No matter who you are, you wait in the same place. You watch families come, sit in moderately comfortable chairs, pace, get up for coffee, thumb idly through a magazine, commiserate with friends who join the vigil. You watch as doctors or nurses come through the large doors, escort the family elsewhere or talk lightly to them there. It doesn't matter who you are. You sit and wait.

The outcome for me and mine was good. I know it is not always so. I know there's a place equality ends.