WHAT THE MAN DOESN’T DO IN THE MORNING

by Robert Lopez

The man doesn’t leave bed when he wakes in the morning, nor does he go to the bathroom to empty his bladder or perform routine ablutions. He doesn’t walk into the kitchen to make breakfast. He doesn’t retrieve a small bowl from the pantry, doesn’t open the refrigerator door to extricate the nonfat yogurt and remove two healthy spoonfuls from the container, then pour a substantial amount of store-bought granola into the bowl. He doesn’t cut up strawberries or banana or add roasted unsalted almonds. The man never has cereal for breakfast, either, not the oat cereal he buys at the supermarket nor the oat cereal he buys at the health food store. There is no difference between these cereals other than the price and sugar content, which he doesn’t pay attention to even though he’d better start soon. The man needs to start taking care of himself as he is well into middle-age and will likely be dead from a heart attack or colorectal cancer before this decade ends. The man has no almond milk in the refrigerator, nor is there any soy milk or oat milk or rice milk or hemp milk and certainly not whole milk as the man is lactose intolerant. The man will not make that mistake again, will not test his body to see if perhaps his digestive system has corrected itself and reverted to childhood. The man will not scramble, fry, poach, or boil two or three eggs depending on his appetite. If he were to scramble or fry the eggs, he wouldn’t crack the eggs in two so he could separate and then dispose of the yolks in an effort to lower his cholesterol. The man hasn’t seen a doctor in years so he doesn’t know if he has to watch his cholesterol, though he assumes he should because both his father and grandfather died young of heart attacks and he will likely suffer the same fate on an August day eight years hence. He’ll be unusually tired but will attribute it to not sleeping very well the past week. Then he’ll come home from his morning walk to shower. This is where he’ll fall. Normally he wouldn’t listen to music while in the shower because for years he didn’t have a sound system or speaker inside or near the bathroom. But he rectified this two years earlier and would sometimes listen to his favorite country or folk records while he showered. The man will hear the lyrics, there’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes, as his body fails him and he loses consciousness. He will be in the middle of shaving, which is another activity he never engaged in while showering until recently. He couldn’t understand why any man would choose to shave in the shower instead of in front of a mirror and over a sink until he tried it once and thought of it as efficient multi-tasking. He still never masturbated in the shower, as he never liked to masturbate standing up, nor did he make it a practice to urinate in the shower, though he almost always had to urinate. Perhaps he urinated in the shower three or four times in his entire adult life. Instead he stood himself up in the shower and mindlessly rotated his body around and around and let the spray wash over him as he thought about whatever might have troubled his mind. Frequently he thought about death, his own death and the deaths of those he knew, family and friends, but not on this last day, as he was concerned about his doubles match tomorrow and whether they could secure a court. This is what he is thinking about as his life concludes, but the man doesn’t know this now because how could he. The man is not a fortune-teller or seer so for today he is fine. What he doesn’t know about his future is a blessing, as it is to everyone. The man also doesn’t know if egg yolks contain cholesterol, if they are more dangerous than the egg whites. He won’t slide two pieces of whole wheat or multi-grain bread into the toaster, will not spread the irish butter he enjoys most across the toast. He won’t spread any jelly or jam or marmalade or preserves across the toast, either. The man doesn’t know if there’s a difference between jelly or jam or marmalade or preserves but he suspects there probably is a difference. He hardly ever prepares steel-cut oats for breakfast and will not measure out how much water is needed according to the ratio on the can. The recommended serving for one is insubstantial and he is unable to figure out how much more to make. He refuses to stand over the stove to stir oatmeal every two or so minutes for half an hour. He never reads a magazine or book while doing this, either. Never in his life has he made French toast or pancakes or waffles for the effort involved, which seems even greater than preparing steel cut oats. The man won’t do this for himself and he won’t do it for his wife or girlfriend, if he’s ever had a wife or girlfriend. Years ago he may’ve had one or two of each and they probably had names like Esperanza and Sofia but they all insisted on breakfast every morning and this always proved to be problematic for everyone.