There are other breakfast in bedders! My story from Seedlings in the Fall issue of the Wagner Alumni Magazine, entitled “The Heel” prompted a fellow alumna to share her breakfast in bed affinity. Thank you, June Billings Safford ’59
Here’s a part of her poem:
BREAKFAST IN BED
The ninety-nine dollar quilt
we bought for thirty- six at Macy’s,
pie shaped patches in pastel blues,
yellows some white, spreads before
my field of vision like a cloth garden.
Gay colored pillows prop me up
against the bedroom wall.
At nine a.m. on a Saturday morning I might
be vacuuming, doing a wash, dusting.
But my husband’s bent on crippling me with benefits.
He’s in the kitchen below filling the menu
I wrote out on an envelope. Instead
of lying in bed with some crippling disease,
I’m studying the slope of the quilt, hungry
and waiting. Made more healthy by his indulgence
I listen. On the next level I hear water running,
cabinets opening and closing, dishes clanking.
Soon a perking coffee smell starts to ply me
with more evidence that breakfast is underway.
… He enters
holding the bed tray like an offering. Soon my nose
is just inches from sustenance and frivolity. A grapefruit
half topped by cool whip and a maraschino cherry, my
vitamins tucked in a whiskey glass. He leaves with
the assurance that scrambled eggs and coffee are next
on his benevolent schedule. How clever he is to ply me
with prizes just for having chosen him.
June Billings Safford ~ Wagner ‘59
Thanks to Laura Barlament, editor of the Wagner Alumni Magazine, for the photo and cooking up some nice interest in “The Heel.”
