This past Sunday at 7:30 just before the storm of the century fell upon us, I discovered I was out of my favorite cereal, one I enjoy as a dessert after dinner, at 8 o’clock.
I rushed to Shaw’s Market, double-masked, hooded, gloved, and face shield-adjusted; I grabbed my large almond chocolate milk and rushed to the cereal aisle to get my family sized box of …
Wait! Egad! Apple Jacks. Apple Jacks with blue carrots, Cap’n Crunch and Raisin Bran, but where was my beloved treat?
I drove up to Hannaford, only to find the same emptiness.
Pulling out my iPhone, I called my daughter Jillana, in Los Angeles, who enjoys the same ritual I do.
Her Ralph’s Market, even Target, didn’t have it on their shelves. Has Kellogg’s gone mad? Is this a delta thing? An omicron moment?
That night after watching “Frasier” with a pallid substitute bowl of her Grape-Nuts, and with the wind hollowing, the branches beating against my windows, I had a dismal memory.
January 1939.
I was home from school with a slight fever, and my mother let me move to the living room and sat me down on the couch near the radio.
I feared polio or worse, but Widow Devine, who had had seven kids before me, assured me I wasn’t going to pass away.
For an hour I listened to her soap operas, “Our Gal Sunday,” “One Man’s Family” and others with confusing plots, because my shows — “Captain Midnight” and “Jack Armstrong” — didn’t come on until after school.
J.P. Devine hoists his favorite cereal snack, Rice Krispies. Photo courtesy of J.P. Devine
As I sat there in a velvet fog of Vicks VapoRub while chewing on a handkerchief, pouring through my stack of comic books, lunch time arrived. Mom leaned on the edge of the door frame with laundry in her hand.
“I’m making your soup,” she said.
I just knew that meant Campbell’s tomato soup. That’s her standard cure for fever, strokes and heart attacks. But she surprised me.
“Eileen brought over some new cereal she thought you’d like.”
“Wheaties?”
“No.”
“Cream of Wheat? I hate Cream of Wheat.”
“No, it’s a rice, son.”
“Rice, like Chinese-people rice?”
I buried my face in her 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair throw pillow.
“Give it a try,” she sighed and left.
A few minutes later, she brought in my Dick Tracy bowl full of what looked like tiny, toasted gravel, and drowned it in cold milk.
“Eileen says if you put it to your ear, it makes a sound.”
I perked up. A sound? I held the bowl to my ear.
What I heard that morning changed my life forever.
Mom set the big, colorful box in my lap. There they were, three little cartoon characters and their names, “Snap, Crackle and Pop.” I kept listening like it was a radio show. “Snap,” like a rubber band; “crackle,” like tiny sticks on a fairy bonfire; “pop,” like tiny firecrackers.
It was magic.
I remember eating three bowls that morning and that I sat there with Rice Krispies sticking to my ear and all over my pajama top.
I don’t remember exactly when I tired of listening to my cereal, but I passed the magic on to my daughters, and they still remember.
Try a bowl and give it a listen. Hear it? Yeah. Is that fun or what?
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.
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