Letters to Reinhold: Eating dill pickles in paradise

Breakfast was your favorite meal; you often said so. Sometimes you would remember that the Dutch were known to have cheese with their breakfast. You liked that custom, so why did it never occur to me to give you cheese for breakfast? Of course, we frequently had cheese for lunch, and my housekeeping mind may have reasoned, "Well, we can't have cheese at two meals, can we?" Perhaps you would have liked cheese for breakfast and then we might have had eggs for lunch? But often you weren't home for lunch and had to eat elsewhere, whether on your travels, at some committee luncheon (where the food probably was ghastly) or with students in the cafeteria at Union Seminary (where you swallowed your food whole because you were talking at the same time). 

Anyhow, my sense of guilt remains, for I should have been imaginative—a word you often used where I might have used the word "sensitive"—and made available not just cheese, but all sorts of cheeses for breakfast. I am haunted by this recollection when I am abroad—not only in Holland but also in Israel, where people have a variety of lovely things for breakfast, including cheese. And I can hear you saying, "In Holland, they often have cheese for breakfast." 

I suppose that such memories are part of the invested capital left by a very happy marriage. But I find myself amused that minor details—if food be a minor detail—remind me of so many areas in which I lacked imagination, or was too engrossed in habits of behavior and routine to respond to things you might have liked to have or to have done. Perhaps life isn't long enough. We were married for nearly 40 years—40 years except for six months—and still that was not long enough. A favorite line of verse you used to quote was from a little poem by Ralph Hodgson: "Time, you old gypsy man, will you not stay, put up your caravan for just one day?" And I might add to that a line from a pious hymn about "eternity being far too short"—too short for praising God, I believe the hymn's context has it, but I would also want to say, far too short for showing love in little ways as well as big. And so, because food is always with us, because we have to eat several times a day, and because we go to the grocery store perhaps more frequently than to church, it is often food that reminds me of my shortcomings.