A Breakfast-Shaped Universe

The sausages at Croton Harmon Diner were probably not safe to eat. They were huge and greasy, and I didn't want to know what was in them. My dad and I used to go there on Sunday mornings.

Time, or so I believe, has a habit of folding in on itself. 

Driving past that diner one day, I told my mom, “Oh, that's where dad and I go on Sundays.” 

“Oh,” she said, “In high school, my best friend and I would go there to do homework.” 

And so time folded, like an omelet folded over filling, my life folded into my mom’s – an omelet of mushrooms and cheddar (when I used to tell her, “I don’t like mushrooms”) – doing homework in a diner. Sometimes, I wondered if the old lady who took my order had taken my mom’s. Maybe she saw me and thought of my mom, but couldn’t grasp the memory. 

I would sit uncomfortably, doing homework with my dad over a bowl of fruit. The other families, four or five people at each table, laughed, talked, and ate pancakes. We were strange there, but probably not to anyone but me. In the diner, no one really cares who you are or why you are there. 

Sometimes all we did was go to the Croton Diner. Sometimes we drove further, all the way to Somers, once to Danbury, and another time to Kingston. We took the scenic route to West Point and watched the cadets outside run laps through town, singing: “You can't break my body down!” Often, my dad pointed out a window and asked, “What do you think of that?” In this case, a tank was parked up on the sidewalk. I would go find whatever it was on Wikipedia and read the article to him. On the drive, sometimes we played music, sometimes we talked, sometimes we didn’t say anything at all. We stopped doing homework; I would leave it in the car, and instead we would study one another. 

What I learned later (when I got smarter and wiser) was that he got the idea from our fighting. My dad and I used to fight a lot, and in his search to resolve our problem, he decided that time spent together getting to know each other was the best solution. We’d missed so much of each other’s lives being busy, so by the time I was twelve, he didn’t really know me very well, and I didn’t know him at all. He worked a lot, often in other states. 

He woke me up one day (7 a.m. on a random Sunday, and with no warning) with: “Get up and get dressed, we’re going for breakfast.” 

Our fights largely happened because we did not understand each other, so we used the time to, from, and during our diner dates to get acquainted. We played each other’s music, picked each other’s brains, learned math, and read books together. Now, I think we’re good friends, although we haven’t gotten breakfast together in a while. I sit with him in the kitchen, or he’ll pick me up from school with no warning. Sometimes, I make the effort to spend dedicated time with him, but we don’t need to be so organized now.

My dad folded into my perception of myself. Only five years ago, I would have told you, “I’m nothing like him,” but now I think he and I are more similar than not. We both get the same coffee, a cappuccino with milk and sugar. I use brown, and he likes Stevia. We “plan” trips the same way (type B), much to my mother’s dismay. We value quiet time, sports cars, well-maintained roads, and being right. 

We spent a lot of time talking about reality. We both love science fiction. My dad has made me watch countless movies and read numerous books (Star Wars, Fight Club, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Terminator, I, Robot, among others). We spent a lot of time listening to each other describe our understanding of the world. Being his daughter, of course, I listened for answers, and he listened for questions. 

One conversation, on the road in Nevada, between Las Vegas and Death Valley, I told him, “I would like to know what shape the universe is.” Instead of answering me, my dad put on a podcast. The speaker intoned, “More and more, astrophysicists believe the universe is shaped like a doughnut, rounding around itself.” At some point, it was believed to be a pancake, a flat plane, or a blueberry, a marble of a universe. Some people believe it’s soft and semi-fluid, shapeless and endless, like scrambled eggs.

So, my life folded in on itself, the shape of the universe compared to diner breakfast options. 

I asked my question again, “What do you think the shape of the universe is?” 

Again, my dad responded with a non-answer: “Whoever you marry is going to have to be a very strong person.” He told me that I can be very strange because my “idea of a good conversation usually ends in a headache.” And he’s right. I’d rather ask one hard question than several simple ones, like “What’s your favorite color?” 

It wasn’t until that moment that it occurred to me that of all the people I will meet in the world, none of them will be just like my dad. Despite the folding and painful flow of existence, the universe cannot have two of my dad. 

Isn’t that strange? 

The world is very strange. Not a soul in any diner I went to knew why my dad or I were there. Why was I crying over math homework, and he eating blueberries one by one? No one knew that we had driven an hour to get there and that he had woken me up at six. No one knew how hard he was working to get to know me. It’s so strange, and, at the same time, I didn’t know any of them either. I could not point them out in a crowd or tell you their names or why they ate what they did. All that, and I am lucky enough (in a universe filled with intangible things like thoughts and feelings) to hazard a guess at why my dad took me out to breakfast with him. Explaining the word “love” is impossible. How strange it is to feel a thing we cannot describe. 

“So, what do you think about being a fish?” I asked, and my dad said, “It's much less slimy than I imagined it would be.” 

It's a fascinating concept: the shape of our reality. Because in practice, it doesn’t matter at all. The actual shape of our universe changes nothing about how we live our lives. Even if I learn that the universe is an eye in a fish in an ocean that is filled with other universes, it doesn’t change the way butter tastes. It doesn’t change anything about the red leather benches I sat on or what I sang in the car with my dad, and it probably won’t stop anyone from eating bad sausages at highway-side diners. 

And with him, I am hardly strange. 

Then again, how strange is it to be anything at all?