My wife and I were discussing breakfast cereals the other day. I mentioned how, in previous years, every half decade or so I would develop an inexplicable hankering for some sugary staple of my childhood: Cocoa Krispies, mostly, or Captain Crunch or Lucky Charms.
"Lucky Charms, ewww," she said.
And sometimes, I recall, I'd actually go so far as to buy a box of Cocoa Krispies, and have a bowl or two — well, I must have polished off the box, eventually. Or maybe the boys helped.
But now that I'm easing into my dottage, I never do that, but have settled on just two cereals: Wheat Chex and Shredded Wheat. They are the only varieties I buy or eat.
Not that I mix them together. My wife does that. She'll mix three cereals, together in one bowl, a practice I look on with something akin to horror.
"Miscegenation!" I'd mutter, back when I'd tease her about it, employing an antique term for race mixing — I might be the only person who deploys that word as a light breakfast tease. She can have her Cheerios and her Total, her Grape Nut Flakes and Corn Flakes — particularly that last one. I haven't eaten a single Corn Flake in 25 years. Yuck.
Wheat Chex, and Shredded Wheat, eaten alternatively, for variety, on the day or two a week when I don't have my traditional English muffin and grapefruit.
I'm not saying they're the only cereals in the world, or the best. But they're the ones I like. Because you reach a point in life, where you know what you want, and ignore what you don't. I'd no sooner waste a breakfast eating a bowl of Rice Krispies than I'd read a John Kass column unprompted — surprisingly similar experiences, now that I think of it: bland little kernels, of rice or language, emitting a quiet sort of strangled shriek as they dissolve into a soggy nothing.
I'm not saying change is possible — for instance. My wife had the strange and exotic practice of putting fruit on her cereal. Bananas, strawberries, blueberries. This struck me as some weird healthful craze, like running in the rain or doing calisthenics at your desk. I didn't have any joke on par with miscegenation. I just looked at her askance — or rather, tried not to look at her at all. Fruit on cereal? Where does she get these insane ideas? Some website? "Seven offbeat things to do to catch your man's attention at breakfast."
Although. Marriage has a gravity. A tacit traction. Couples have a tendency to draw toward one another. And we've been having breakfast together for 40 years now. So one fine day — I don't remember when — I was drawn toward her practice. Maybe I was bored. Maybe we had a particularly large store of blueberries to dispose of, and I didn' want them to go bad. But I put some blueberries on my Chex.
And they were .... good. The cool sweet soft orbs nicely offsetting the crisp savory wheat squares. The taste of blueberries a counterpoint to the Chex. I liked them together, and got into the habit of heaping a half cup of blueberries onto my cereal, which complicate the cereal eating process, as they must be removed from the refrigerator and washed and drained.
But it got so that — and this is why I'm writing this overly-detailed and admittedly almost psycho post about breakfast cereals — I couldn't eat breakfast cereal without blueberries. "Let's pick up some blueberries!" I'd say, at the grocery. I became savvy of the wide price swings — $2.99 a pint, $6.99, varying widely with the season.
I'd go to eat some cereal, realize we were out of blueberries, and put the box back. They'd become essential to cereal eating, like milk. What was once forbidden was now mandatory.
The title of the blog, is from "The Once and Future King," by T.H. White — the English novelist, not to be confused with Theodore H. White, the American political writer. "The Once and Future King" uses Arthurian legend as a protracted allegory for the battle against totalitarianism. Wat, after being turned into an ant by Merlin, approaches an ant hill fortress with the slogan, "EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS MANDATORY" emblazoned over the entrance to each tunnel.
"He read the notice with dislike," White writes. "Though he did not understand its meaning." There's a lot of that going around.
For now, we retain our options, in all things great and small. For instance, my wife also eats breakfast cereal as a snack, popping dry Cheerios into her mouth like a toddler. I'll sometimes join her, while we chat, and participate in the odd culinary ritual, but more for the sociability. It's not something I would ever do on my own. I do not eat cereal dry as a snack. Yet.
"He read the notice with dislike," White writes. "Though he did not understand its meaning." There's a lot of that going around.
For now, we retain our options, in all things great and small. For instance, my wife also eats breakfast cereal as a snack, popping dry Cheerios into her mouth like a toddler. I'll sometimes join her, while we chat, and participate in the odd culinary ritual, but more for the sociability. It's not something I would ever do on my own. I do not eat cereal dry as a snack. Yet.
Photo atop blog is from Darren Bader's 2020 "fruits, vegetables; fruit and vegetable salad" installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
