Box of Life
You thought I might like a box of the cereal I devoured as a lad — a change from the breakfast routine now that I’m deep into my oatmeal years.
I resisted, rooted in my ruts as I am, but you persisted.
In the next load of groceries, as promised: the familiar box with the cheerful blue, red, yellow, and green lettering.
At breakfast, I tore open the flap and the bag inside, the sweetness emanating from within luring me.
I almost drooled on myself as I shook out a small bowlful — a fraction of the slag heap I would have had in my boyhood.
I dropped a fistful of blueberries onto the mound of straw-colored squares.
I dribbled in milk — almond milk, true, not the whole milk I used to use — but still up to the task of serving as a creamy liquid foil for the cereal.
I slid the spoon in and took my first mouthful — and I froze.
I was no longer in our kitchen but standing in the sunny piano room of my mother’s small shingled house on Cape Cod.
Green-gold spring sunlight checkered the braided rug where I stood listening to her practice “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair” (and swear like a seadog when she hit a clinker).
As she played, I ladled spoonful and after spoonful into my adolescent maw, my arm and hand a breakfast-food metronome.
I snap back to the now — back from fifty years ago when life was a continuous sea change, when Life became my madeleine, a token of a time long past but never gone.
I pluck a single pale golden latticework wafer-thin square from the bowl even as the oaty sweetness of the spoonful I chew — a flavor a horse would nicker for — lingers in my mouth.
I hold it up and peer through its slats, a minuscule spyglass.
I squint through its louvers and the window to the sky beyond.
Am I looking into the past or into the moment?
In the upper atmosphere I see a cirrus formation shaped like an elongated Life, a vaporous doppelgänger for the square I hold up before me — a prism refracting past, future, and present.
I lower it, then place it on my tongue. I let its sugar dissolve. I crunch down.
And I realize that though the flavor released the memory, the present is what I savor with gratitude.
Gratitude for your gesture, your intuition, your knowing what such a simple treat would mean to me.
You, my giver of life.