Breakfast Sandwiches: A New Beginning
Or, Is Puttering An Actual Thing?
A few months ago, after years of the weekend busy-ness of single motherhood and caring for aging parents, I found myself alone with my husband one Saturday morning.
Robert looked at me and said, “What would you like to do today?”
What the hell was he talking about? Didn’t we have to run around and do a thousand chores? No, he said, we did not. He even suggested that I putter.
“Putter?” I said.
“Yes,” he said, “putter. I love puttering around on a Saturday morning.”
Jesus H. Christ, I thought, who was this man I married? Apparently, while I have been at my parents’ home every weekend, he has been puttering.
Most of my weekends over the past two decades—the height of the pandemic excepted—were spent caring for my parents at their home on Long Beach Island, New Jersey. So after my father passed away in 2021 and my mother passed away at the end of last year, I wasn’t sure what I should do with my newly free weekends. But I did know one thing: I was hungry.
I don’t remember my first breakfast sandwich. I’m not even sure we were a breakfast sandwich family. I do remember tiny me sitting in the ridiculously small back seat (if you can call it that) of my father’s Jaguar XKE on Sunday mornings with my sister, each of us in our nightgowns. We were holding a stack of Sunday papers and two brown bags, one filled with buns and one with rolls. They were purchased at the Gaston Avenue Bakery and were used to feed the troops (we were a family of seven) while we read the papers. Even as a baby, you were handed the comics to review while you ate your salt stick or coconut twist. This was our Sunday morning routine.
As I grew up, other carbs, like bagels and bialys, were introduced and mornings were no longer so leisurely. Years later, after I moved to New York City in January of 1988, I had my first bacon, egg and cheese on a Kaiser roll and there was pretty much no going back. It was the perfect sandwich for people on the go, and I was on the go. Leisurely Sundays had been given over to working weekends spent raising kids and taking care of family members. Time set aside for morning indulgences had disappeared. Until recently.
Back to Robert and that fateful question—what did I want to do?
I decided while scrolling on Instagram that the answer was Agi’s Counter in Crown Heights. I’d always wanted to go. And so I said that, and he said we should. And so we did! And now it’s “a thing.” I putter with Robert on weekends, which often includes, but is not limited to, long walks, strolling through the farmer’s market and picking up a new breakfast sandwich—which, it turns out, is the best thing to eat on a weekend morning while puttering.