The Breakfast of a Lifetime

We were sitting around a small table at my mom’s favorite spot, Cupz and Crepes, when something hit me. It was just the five of us. Pete, Rosie, Michael, Nicole, and me. No spouses. No kids. Just my family, the original crew.

I couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. Maybe we were teenagers. Maybe even younger. Life pulled us in different directions, different states, different seasons. I live in Arizona now. Michael’s in New Jersey. My sister Nicole still lives with my parents back home, so I actually see her more than I see my own brother, which tells you something about how spread out we’ve gotten.

Mike and Nicole had flown in for Mason’s Confirmation into the Catholic Church. Mike’s flight landed just after one in the morning on Friday, and I picked him up half asleep, then went back for Nicole around ten. By the time Saturday rolled around I was running on fumes. I wasn’t even hungry. All I wanted was a nap. But my mom wanted crepes, and I wanted to go for her, so I went. I’m glad I did.

Cupz and Crepes is my mom’s place the way some people have a bar where everybody knows their name. The owners, Rick and Terry, are her friends. Terry doesn’t just run the place, she waits tables herself half the time, and she’s usually the one working the espresso machine and the wall of syrups behind the counter for the Italian sodas. Gina’s at the register up front. We walked in and Gina lit up. “Hey, Rosie.” Then Terry’s voice came over the counter, over the noise of the milk steamer, calling out to my mom by name, then to the rest of us. “Hey, everybody. Hey, Pete.” Rick waved from behind the counter where he was working the crepe iron. Nobody had to tell anybody our order.

My mom gets the same thing every time. Ham, egg, and cheese crepe, feta specifically, no substitutions, no variations, ordered the same way she’s ordered it for years. She’s the one who actually loves crepes. The rest of us go because that’s where she wants to be, not because we’re all secretly craving crepes ourselves, though nobody’s complaining either.

When I left Massachusetts, I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to build something like that again somewhere else. A place where people know you. A whole support system built out of small business owners and friends who ask about your kids by name. Ahwatukee is that now. It took years, but I found it. And having my actual family, the Hingham crew, sitting at a table in that same place, everybody falling into their old roles like no time had passed, that’s a specific kind of unique. My parents’ world and the world I built for myself out here overlapped for one Saturday morning.

And everybody did fall into their old roles. My dad’s the patriarch, quiet until he isn’t, the one who reaches for the check without anybody asking. My mom runs the table even when she’s not trying to, because whatever she wants is what we’re doing, and none of us mind. I’m the oldest, so I was cracking jokes the way I always have, the ones that used to get me in trouble at the dinner table growing up. Michael was catching everybody up on New Jersey, work, life, whatever’s going on out there. Nicole filled in the gaps the rest of us miss by not being around, the day to day stuff back home that only she’d know.

We weren’t parents or professionals or grown-ups juggling schedules and calendars. For about an hour, we were just five people who grew up in the same house, laughing at things that probably wouldn’t have been funny to anyone else at any other table in that restaurant. The kind of laughing that starts in your chest before you’ve even figured out what set it off.

It took what felt like a small act of God to get all five of us in the same room. Ironically, it was Mason’s Confirmation that did it, a Catholic sacrament pulling together a table that had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with people finally being in the same city on the same weekend. Jocelyn didn’t come. The kids didn’t come. It was just my family, which made it feel less like a stop on somebody’s trip and more like a throwback to being twelve years old again, minus the curfew.

I kept looking around the table trying to lock it in. Terry calling my mom’s name across the counter. My dad reaching for the check like it was never a question. My mom’s crepe arriving exactly the way she orders it every single time. Michael mid-sentence about something happening a couple thousand miles away. Nicole laughing at a joke I don’t even remember making.

And somewhere in the middle of taking it all in, it hit me. The last time the five of us sat down for a breakfast like this, just us, no spouses, no kids, was Stars on the Harbor back in Hingham. That was at least twenty five years ago, probably closer to thirty. I did the math sitting right there at the table and it stopped me for a second. Three decades between one family breakfast and the next.

Will this happen again? I hope so. But I’ve got the one meal now either way. The one photo. The one morning where a place I built for myself in Arizona and the family I grew up with in Massachusetts sat down at the same table, and for about an hour, nobody had anywhere else to be.