I get up at 6:00 so I can sit alone with my father. He rises with the sun each day.

"Sun's early this morning. Got to turn the clock ahead tonight. Save the daylight. That means I can get out earlier in morning. There's something about the morning."

"The water's still hot," he says. I make a cup of tea. We sit together. For all the days I can remember he has had a bowl of cereal topped with a mound of fruit.

"What's that you're having this morning?" I inquire. He looks up at me with a smirk.

"Eggs and cereal."

"You cooked some eggs already?"

"No."

"Oh."

"Eggs in my cereal."

"Oh." (pause) "Raw?"

"Yes."

(I gag.) "Something new?"

"This morning."

"Oh."

"See, I reached into the refrigerator for what I thought was a dish of apricots, and I poured them on my cereal."

I see.

"I stirred them in good before I realized they weren't apricots at all. They were eggs. So I thought, well, why waste them."

My mother sighs loudly this morning and holds on to her stomach. It's a bad morning for her body. She can't eat. Her stomach is swollen with air like a balloon about to pop. "I don't like to be a pain," she says. I offer to sit on her pain. She laughs, "Don't you dare."

She stays in the lounge chair while my father and I eat homemade rolls and sip coffee. He begins the story of the apricot eggs.

Momentarily, she forgets about her pain and opens her mouth wide to exclaim, "Why I was going to use those yolks for French toast!" I could see her thinking of the waste. "I used the whites for your macaroon dreams," she explains to me.

"Oh, I didn't waste them, I ate them."

For a moment, I thought she was going to gag.

In another moment, she bursts into laughter, relieving us all.