New every morning.(THE STRAGGLER)(oatmeal)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Is anybody in a good humor at breakfast? Well, Mr. Pickwick was. Our last glimpse of that gentleman is at the breakfast table after the marriage of Mr. Snodgrass. "Mr. Pickwick, having said grace, pauses for an instant, and looks round him. As he does so, the tears roll down his cheeks, in the fulness of his joy."

All right for him. In those days the gentry breakfasted at ten, even without the excuse of a morning wedding, and drank Madeira with their broiled ham and eggs, and had a day of idleness in front of them. For us working stiffs it's the 6 A.M. trill of the alarm clock, the groping for clothes in darkness from consideration for the spouse still asleep, the stumble downstairs to the kitchen, a grayish dawn showing beyond the windows. It's not Dickens who comes to my mind at such moments but the author of "Jerusalem, My Happy Home":

 
   No dampish mist is seen in thee, 
   No cold nor darksome night ... 

There spoke a man who had to get up in the morning. Quite possibly he began his breakfast arrangements by putting a scoop of oatmeal into a bowl, as I do. Our morning routines diverge after that, there having been no microwave ovens in the 16th century, nor any bananas to slice into the cooked porridge. Orange juice I am not sure about. I have read somewhere that a Jesuit imprisoned in the Tower of London during the reign of Elizabeth I used to communicate with the outside world via invisible orange-juice writing. The recipient would warm the paper by a candle, revealing the words. How bad could the Tower have been, if they had orange juice? Idle thoughts, as I trudge down the driveway in the dampish mists to retrieve my New York Post.

Setting the Post on the kitchen table, I cross to the counter to add the necessary splash of cold milk to my oatmeal. In those few seconds my teenage daughter, the household's other lark, appears and spots the paper. There is a picture of some celebrity on the front page, unknown to me but of consuming interest to her. I open negotiations for a share of the paper, coming away with the op-eds and business news. We settle at the table and eat in silence, Dad with his pundits and mergers, she with her movie stars.

Oatmeal and I go back a long way together. At the remotest edge of memory I sit watching fascinated as a thread of treacle descends from a spoon held over a bowl of porridge. When the leisurely treacle meets the porridge it suddenly becomes an active thing, its thread crossing and re-crossing itself frantically in one spot, as if trying to write, but melting to a little golden pool before the words can form. The treacle was Tate & Lyle's Golden Syrup, with that peculiar picture on the can: a dead lion in whose carcass--improbably, I recall thinking even in infancy--some bees had nested. "Out of the strong came forth sweetness," said the caption. Has any other breakfast food been packaged with a Biblical quotation, I wonder?