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Day’s Verse:
From the rising of the sun to its setting
The name of the Lord is to be praised.
The Lord is high above all nations;
His glory is above the heavens.
Psalm 113:3-4
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This morning I created my first fully successful timed meal. This triumph included from-scratch biscuits, bacon, eggs cooked two ways, and orange juice. I have never timed meals well, but this time the biscuits came out of the oven just as the eggs finished and the bacon came off the frying pan. We enjoyed a hot, perfectly-timed meal, and if the bacon could have been less blackened or the biscuits a little more golden, nobody mentioned it.

This breakfast got me thinking: In London lots of breakfast places advertised a Full English Breakfast, which included all sorts of typically British things like black pudding (what is that?) and thick, floppy bacon. Much of our time in London I felt rather culture-less: people from around the world have historic/traditional/ethnic clothes, music, and food. What do Americans have? Jeans and T-shirts? Rap, hip-hop, and jazz? Hamburgers and fries? I felt rather depressed by the realization that although American culture pervades the rest of the world and arouses anger in traditionalists around the globe, Americans have no true culture of their own. We exist as a blend of everybody else and proudly proclaim our tolerance (ha) of all cultures, yet in so doing have failed to establish any positive significantly American contributions to the global culture. But maybe the American breakfast, with its eggs, hash browns (omitted today due to lack of potatoes), biscuits, real crispy bacon, and fresh-squeezed orange juice could stand in for us. It’s got to be better than an Egg McMuffin, at least.