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On Sundays, my dad makes waffles. He has a bare-bones routine down – using the basic recipe that he’s fine-tuned over the years, one mixing bowl, no muss, no fuss  – from which he does not deviate, as a rule.

When he does break one of his self-made rules, you’d never know it ever was one. At some point within the last year or so, he started grinding the wheat that goes into the batter. When I saw him get out the electric grain mill on a Saturday night and set about preparing for the next day’s batch, as though he’d been doing it that way all along, I was surprised, and then not.

This calm deliberate unflappable way of going about life, using change itself as an eraser so that it seems like nothing interesting happened at all, infuriated teenage me to no end. It also might have something to do with the difficulty I have being any kind of squeaky wheel. That nonsense got me nowhere during my formative years and so those self-promotional wiles that many women buff to a high shine in the twilight of their childhood withered on the vine in my case.

This Sunday and last Sunday, I made waffles. I used a couple of different recipes (today’s was better). My way of going about the whole process isn’t much of a way, by my dad’s standards. I don’t refuse to consider recipes that involve multiple bowls or beating egg whites. I tweak the recipes, but not systematically – mostly to use what I have and not have to do the old-man shuffle to the store. I top them with jam and whipped cream. The whipped cream goes in my coffee, too. My Scandinavian ancestors look upon such choices approvingly, I think.

Who knows if this waffling will continue past these two weeks. They’re just what I found myself wanting to eat on the last morning of the weekend. So I made them, and they were good. For some odd reason, I’m feeling pretty calm deliberate and unflappable about the week ahead.