Every first day of school, from kindergarten through senior year, Dad conducted the breakfast interview.
The ritual never changed.
Same kitchen table.
Same pancakes.
Same cassette recorder beside the syrup.
He asked three questions:
What are you excited about?
What are you scared of?
What should I ask you next year?
We answered while eating breakfast.
As children, we loved it. As teenagers, we groaned. Dad never skipped a year.
He recorded thirteen tapes for each child.
Then, the week my daughter started kindergarten, a package arrived in the mail.
Inside were my thirteen tapes and one new cassette.
The label said:
Dad — age 68.
He had recorded his own answers alone at the kitchen table.
“What am I excited about?” he said. “Your daughter starts school this week.”
“What am I scared of? That you’ll be too busy to do the interviews.”
“What should you ask next year?”
He paused.
“Ask her the questions, honey. The pancakes are the recorder now.”
My daughter answered her first three questions the next morning.
Same table.
Same pancakes.
New tape.
Part 2
Dad began the breakfast interviews when I started kindergarten.
He had bought a small cassette recorder from a store in town. It was silver, rectangular, and difficult to operate. The recording button clicked loudly when pressed.
He placed it beside his plate and explained that we were making a record.
“A record of what?” I asked.
“Who you are today.”
I did not understand why anyone would need to record me. I was five. I assumed I would remain five forever.
Dad asked the first question while the pancakes were still hot.
“What are you excited about?”
I said recess.
“What are you scared of?”
I said the school bathroom.
“What should I ask you next year?”
I asked him to inquire about dinosaurs.
He saved the tape.
The following year, he asked the same questions.
I answered differently. I was excited about learning to write in cursive. I was scared of a boy who had pushed me from the swings. I wanted Dad to ask whether I still liked dinosaurs.
He recorded everything.
He never corrected my answers or told me what I should be excited about. He simply listened.
By third grade, the interview had become tradition.
Dad made pancakes shaped like circles, though sometimes they resembled countries. He put the cassette recorder in the same place and tested the batteries before we sat down.
My siblings had their own interviews.
We took turns at the table, each child answering the three questions while the others tried not to interrupt.
The tapes accumulated in a shoebox.
Dad labeled them carefully with our names and school years.
When I became a teenager, I considered the ritual embarrassing.
My friends slept late on the first day of school. I had to sit in the kitchen and explain my feelings into an ancient recorder while my father flipped pancakes.
“What are you excited about?” he asked one year.
“Nothing.”
“What are you scared of?”
“Nothing.”
“What should I ask you next year?”
“Whether I’m still alive.”
Dad continued recording.
I expected him to argue.
He only said, “That’s useful information.”
The next year, I answered more honestly.
I was excited about leaving town after graduation. I was scared I would fail. I wanted him to ask whether I had found people who made me feel at home.
He did not know that those answers would stay with me.
At the time, the interview felt like an obligation. Dad treated it like a promise.
He never skipped a year, even when he was sick or working early shifts. If we traveled, he brought the recorder. If the pancakes burned, he made more.
He believed the first day of school deserved a beginning that could be remembered.
Part 3
When I left for college, Dad mailed the cassette instead of handing it to me.
He included a note:
Answer the questions somewhere with pancakes.
I called him and complained.
He said the interview was not optional.
I recorded myself in the dorm kitchen while a roommate laughed in the background. I was excited about independence, scared of becoming unrecognizable to my family, and wanted Dad to ask whether I had learned how to rest.
I mailed the tape home.
Dad saved it with the others.
The ritual continued through graduation, my first job, my marriage, and the birth of my daughter.
The questions remained the same even as my answers changed.
I was excited about becoming a mother.
I was scared I would repeat my own parents’ mistakes.
I asked Dad to find out whether I was doing enough.
He answered from behind the recorder.
“You’re doing fine.”
“That wasn’t one of the questions.”
“It should be.”
When my daughter was born, Dad brought pancakes to the hospital, though no one had asked him to. He stood beside the bed and told me that someday she would answer the same three questions.
I laughed.
“She’ll probably refuse.”
“She’ll change her mind.”
He was right.
The package arrived the week she started kindergarten.
I recognized the shoebox before I opened it. The cassette tapes were labeled in Dad’s handwriting, one for every year from kindergarten through senior year.
I had forgotten how many there were.
The new tape sat on top.
Dad had recorded it alone.
His voice sounded older than I remembered. He paused more often. He breathed close to the microphone.
“What am I excited about?”
He answered that my daughter was starting school.
“What am I scared of?”
He said he was afraid I would be too busy to continue the interviews.
Then he answered the third question.
“Ask her the questions, honey. The pancakes are the recorder now.”
I listened to the tape twice.
Then I called him.
“You recorded a fourth question.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“It was important.”
“You’re not allowed to change the format.”
“I’m your father. I can change the format.”
I told him I would conduct the interview.
He said he knew.
“What if she refuses?”
“Make better pancakes.”
The next morning, my daughter sat at the kitchen table with her hair still damp from the bath.
The cassette recorder rested beside the syrup.
She asked why we were doing an interview.
I told her it was a family tradition.
She asked whether she had to answer.
I said no.
She picked up a fork.
“Okay.”
Part 4
I pressed record.
The button clicked just as loudly as it had thirty years earlier.
“What are you excited about?” I asked.
My daughter thought for a long time.
“Recess,” she said.
I smiled.
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to play tag and nobody knows I’m fast yet.”
The answer sounded like something I might have said at five.
“What are you scared of?”
She looked at the pancakes.
“That I won’t know where to sit.”
I wanted to tell her she would be fine. I wanted to explain that every child felt that way and that she would soon know exactly where to sit.
Instead, I said, “That makes sense.”
She looked relieved.
“What should I ask you next year?”
She considered this more carefully.
“Ask me if I made a best friend.”
I promised.
The recorder continued running while we ate.
She told me about her backpack, her teacher, and the shoes she had chosen. She asked whether Dad had really made these interviews every year.
I told her yes.
“Did you always answer?”
“Not always honestly.”
“Why not?”
“Sometimes I was a teenager.”
She nodded as if this explained everything.
My father came over that afternoon.
He brought the original recorder, which he had kept in a drawer for decades. He set it beside the new one and compared the two as if inspecting machinery.
“Still works,” he said.
“So do you.”
“Debatable.”
My daughter asked him what he had been scared of when he was young.
He said, “Your mother’s cooking.”
Mom, who was standing in the doorway, threw a dish towel at him.
He laughed.
Then my daughter asked whether he had answered the questions every year.
“Your mother did,” he said.
“She refused sometimes,” I corrected.
“Only the interesting years.”
That evening, I listened to the new tape alone.
My daughter’s voice was small and certain. Behind her, the fork clicked against the plate. A truck passed outside. The refrigerator turned on.
The recording contained more than her answers.
It contained the morning itself.
That was what Dad had understood.
The tapes were not designed to preserve perfect statements. They preserved ordinary sounds around a changing person.
Pancakes being cut.
A chair scraping the floor.
A parent asking the same questions while trying not to cry.
At the end of the tape, my daughter asked whether I would save it.
I said yes.
“Forever?”
“As long as I can.”
Dad’s tape had taught me that forever was not a promise anyone could make literally.
It was a direction.
You saved what you could. You passed it on when the next person was ready.
Part 5
My daughter has now answered the breakfast interview every first day of school.
Some years, she gives thoughtful answers. Some years, she says she is excited about lunch and scared of homework.
She has never failed to answer the third question.
Her questions change with her age.
Ask me whether I still like drawing.
Ask me if I’m being brave.
Ask me whether I figured out who I want to be.
One year, she asked me to ask whether she still talks to her best friend.
Another year, she asked me whether she had been kind.
I keep every tape.
The cassette recorder is fragile now. We use a digital recorder too, but I keep the old machine on the table because my father believed the ritual mattered as much as the technology.
Dad attends when he can.
He sits at the edge of the kitchen and eats pancakes while my daughter answers. Sometimes he repeats the questions under his breath.
He says he is not interfering.
He is interfering.
When my daughter started middle school, she asked whether the interviews would continue until senior year.
I told her that was the plan.
“What if I’m too busy?”
I answered her with Dad’s words.
“The pancakes are the recorder now.”
She rolled her eyes.
Then she sat down.
My father’s tape remains in the same box as mine and my daughter’s first recording.
His voice is there whenever I need to hear it.
He was excited about a child beginning school.
He was scared that the tradition would end.
He asked me to continue.
He understood that family rituals are not really about repeating the past. They are about giving the future somewhere to begin.
My daughter will eventually grow tired of the questions. She will answer with one word. She may tell me nothing.
I will record it anyway.
Not because I need perfect memories.
Because someday she may want to hear the sound of herself becoming someone new.
And when she has a child of her own, I hope I can send her the tapes.
I hope I can add one of my own.
I hope I can say that I am excited about the child beginning school, scared that the questions will end, and certain of what she should ask next year.
Then I hope she makes pancakes.
The recorder will already be waiting.
