Shot Down in May!

I have blogged before about excrutiatingly difficult dinner times when I was a child, and the memory of a certain breakfast meal came to mind from my last blog, "Mystery Breakfast Food."

When I was a child, you were on your own for breakfast. Breakfast was OverLord/overseer free. You could eat what you wanted. Except there's a loophole, an asterisk the size of Texas on that last statement. My mother stocked only health food. That meant there were no cookies. No doughnuts. No sugar coated cereals.

My younger brother, Jack, and I yearned for Post Sugar Crisps. They were peddled with cute commercials starring a snuggly little bear, the Sugar Bear, and he looked so happy and plump eating those tasty treats of sugary, wheaty goodness. Jack and I had tasted them at other children's houses, but that meant diddly-squat. We ate breakfast at our house. That meant Kellogg's All Bran. At first, All Bran ripped through me like a gallon of Metamucil through a two year old. By the time I was twelve, my intestines had developed the capacity to digest enough roughage to contipate a horse.

We yearned for Sugar Crisps.

Finally, one day, a miracle happened. Jack and I were with our mother at the grocery store and with the inspired amount of cajoling, tears, and persuasion, our mother relented and bought us a box of Sugar Crisps.

We ate the whole box in one morning. We were like those cowboys in the western movies that had been stranded in the desert for two weeks and were dyin' o' thirst, and their horses had crumpled in the last scene, and the cowboys were mumblin' incoherent crap, and their lips were all crudded over and whitish, and the people that found them had to keep them from taking too big a swig of water all at once because their parched throats would swell up. Except we had no one to grab the canteen and keep us from drinking too much water. We were alone in the breakfast room. Alone. All by ourselves. Only the two of us.......and a box of Sugar Crisps.

Our rugged little constitutions couldn't handle that much pleasure, that much joy, that much sugar all in one morning. Hell, we couldn't have handled a whole box of All Bran. We squirted hot broth out our bung holes until we were in a state of exhaustion and compliance, and then our mother informed us we were never to eat those diabolical diuretics ever again.

You're ridin' high in April. Shot down in May!