Cereal, Box and Bowl

Consider the snowflake. Or better yet, a cornflake. Each one unique so we are told. If a cornflake were an island country it would have many miles of seacoast. None resemble Colorado or New Mexico each with its perpendiculars. The flakes look more like the coast of Washington state or Michigan, jagged as the right-hand margin of a contemporary poem.

The latest literary sensation is Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard whose Proustian volumes recall the minutia of his life even before he first gazed upon either snow or corn flakes.  He ponders whether the cereal is tastier when crunched or soggy with milk. Such deliberations inevitably lead to weightier ones. But a reader marvels how he has traced it all back to the child’s early engagement staring into his cereal bowl. Everything is contained in anything, after all.  

Is it a memoir or fiction? The answer is, Yes. It is life revisited and reimagined; what didn’t happen, almost did, or happened to someone else and is reclaimed.

Of equal importance is the cereal box, itself, the variety and arrangement in the cupboard. My step-daughter used to alternate her three cereals, flakes, rounds and squares on consecutive days of the week. If it’s Tuesday it must be Cheerios. The cereal became a way of ordering the world.

Friend, Fred, arranges all the cans on his shelf alphabetically. As he tells it, this is done in case he wakes up suddenly blind. He could grab the tuna fish and know it isn’t the salmon.  I call it the Artie Shaw syndrome. The band leader insisted all pillowcases face the same way and lined up his coins at night in ascending order. Eight marriages later he wrote all about it.

Fred never played Begin the Beguine on the clarinet but has other qualities to endear him. He was miffed when his daughter and son recently scrambled his pantry, as a prank, and even switched his Hi-Lo flakes and Bran Buds. He was immediately returned to the chaos of life. But he recovered in time to email them that he was sitting at his desk with his will and an eraser. Humor is the best revenge.

I can almost remember hiding behind my orange Wheaties box on the kitchen table. It was probably my first newspaper and I was becoming the hero pictured on the back. What better model than Breakfast of Champions? There was a certain magic seeing spoken words come to life on a page (or box). Like watching a flower bloom. These days the only thing I read on the box is the carbohydrate and fiber content.

My cereal bowl is now a flag of blueberries, strawberries and Almond milk with a few slivers of something called Twigs. It keeps me alive …or at least hasn’t killed me. I accept my fate. Never shall my image appear on a box of Wheaties. As for the turmoil of existence I have no need to tidy it up. Flakes, clusters, shreds….every day snaps, crackles and pops; let me hear dat music.

 e has written thousands of pages recalling