USA. A breakfast counter. The waitress recommended the biscuits and gravy, and when the plate arrived, I thought something had gone wrong in the kitchen. I say this with shame. The dish looked like a construction site after rain. Pale mounds. Gray ladle-fall. Speckles I could not identify. In my land, the eye eats first. A meal is arranged like a garden. This meal was arranged like weather. "Is it… finished?" I asked, carefully. "Honey, that's what it looks like." The man beside me was already eating his. He did not look up. "Just try it." I am a man who has charged hillsides at dawn. I raised the fork. I tried it. I must now formally apologize to the biscuits, the gravy, the waitress, the kitchen, and the entire breakfast tradition of the American South. It was magnificent. Warm. Peppered. The biscuit drank the gravy the way a field drinks rain — THAT is why it is shaped like that, you fool — and every mound I had insulted was a soft fold of comfort that my homeland, in eight hundred years, never once thought to invent. "Well?" the waitress asked. "I judged it," I confessed. "By its appearance. I am ashamed." "Everybody does, hon." Everybody does. A national dish that forgives you for doubting it. It expects the doubt. It waits for you on the other side of it. Do not judge the gravy by its face. Judge yourself, for hesitating. I order it every Saturday now. I no longer see the construction site. I see only the garden. It was a garden the whole time. The eye must be trained.

USA. A diner. The waitress asked me how I want my eggs, and my mind went completely blank. "How do you want your eggs, hon?" Want. How do I WANT them. No one has ever asked me this. In my land, the egg arrives as the cook decrees, and you thank the egg, the cook, and your ancestors, in that order. "Scrambled? Over easy? Sunny side up?" she offered, gently, the way one talks a man down from a roof. The terms did not help. Over easy — over WHAT, easily? Easy for whom? Sunny side up — these people have named an egg after the dawn. Who does that. I needed time. I have chosen battlefields faster than I chose those eggs. She refilled my coffee and said she'd come back. It was the second refill. I had been deciding for nine minutes. The man on the next stool leaned over. "Just say over easy, man. You can't go wrong." "And if I CAN go wrong?" "...it's eggs, buddy." It's eggs. Eight hundred years of my family training itself to want nothing, and this man dismissed all of it with a fork in his hand. He was right. I will never tell him. "Sunny side up," I declared, with the weight of a man choosing a path for life. "I will face the sun." "You got it, hon." The eggs came. Two small suns on a white plate, looking up at me. Golden. Ridiculous. Exactly what I wanted. So THAT is what wanting feels like. I had to cross an ocean and hold up a breakfast line to learn it. The man on the next stool got his check and left. "Good choice," he said. I have never been more proud of anything. A man does not ask the eggs to be simple. He only becomes a man who knows what he wants. Tomorrow: over easy. I am almost ready.