Listen to Jim’s podcast: http://redclaydiary.com/
or read his story below:
Pondering the Pit and Listening to the Cereal
It is way back in the 1940′s right now, and I am the I who is living in these times. At the moment, I am communicating with you from here, which is a great distance, timewise. I’m in the 20th Century, you are in the 21st Century.
Interesting how the distance can be bridged in seconds, merely through these recorded words.
Anyhow, just wanted you to know where and when I am coming from.
I’m a kid and I am doing what most pre-television kids do each morning. Breakfast. Breakfast can include things like eggs, cereal, bacon, grits, cream of wheat, oatmeal, toast, biscuits, jelly, butter (oleo margarine), salt, pepper, cane sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, sausage, flapjacks…
But breakfast is also blended with everything and everybody around me. The food is just food without the flavor of family and laughter and mumbling…and stuff you can read on the sides of containers.
While the family swirls around me, I escape into the world of various packages that contain the fixin’s. I get to read about the adventures of Snap, Crackle and Pop who live at Rice Krispies…famous athletes grinning muscularly from the Wheaties box…Hopalong Cassidy looking intense at the end of a loaf of bread…Aunt Jemima smiling from a pancake mix box…Little Miss Sunbeam eternally munching on a slice…frighteningly serious doctors recommending Post Toasties as ruffage…
And then there’s the prune box. Prunes are not very exciting, but they do make a nice treat now and then. And the pits are fascinating, sporting a planetoid texture and totally inedible. But the mystery of the prune goes deeper. Inside each prune pit is a kernel, some kind of secret nut. When you bust open the pit, there’s that extra treat to munch—just like a Cracker Jack prize.
And examining prune kernels is just the beginning. While reading and chewing, I get all kinds of fun out of pondering other breakfast mysteries: Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Why do Rice Krispies have their own language? How can eggs be so easy to break yet so durable in their long journey to my parents’ kitchen table? What is the difference between jelly and marmalade and preserves and syrup and molasses and honey? How do you get gravy out of coffee grounds? What happens to the pit and the kernel when pitted prunes are produced? Who decides which is the butter knife and which is the slicing knife?
As I glug my orange juice and break my fast, my metabolism and brain start racing, and I am preparing for a day of school or play—either of which will produce more questions and just a few possible answers.
By the time I’m racing for the bus or the backyard, I am already a scientist, adventurer, athlete, vizier, poet. There is so much to learn about, so much to test, a million would-be solutions to the world’s problems…and I am the one who is going to start addressing them, at least until late morning when I rush to the kitchen or school playground for Kool-Aid or a carbonated drink to get me through till lunchtime.
For the rest of my life, I continue to gaze at all things new in much the same way I gaze at prune pits. What’s inside? What’s behind? What’s the story? What was the journey? What will happen next?
There is always one more thing to examine.
That’s what keeps me going every day to this very day
© Jim Reed 2015 A.D.