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For years and years—
at least through elementary school—
little Jimmy Lockhart would eat no other
breakfast cereal
than Nabisco Shredded Wheat.
None of the other boxes on the
cupboard shelf could tempt him.
None of the jingles between cartoons on Saturday.
None of the Send-Two-Boxtops offers on colorful packages.
None of the promises of Free-Surprise-Inside!
Two brittle bales on the bottom of a bowl.
Jimmy’s mother would splash a
bit of boiling water on those “biscuits,”
and Jimmy would shovel sugar
over them, drown them in milk,
and munch to his heart’s content.
Then one day—
no one remembers when or why—
Jimmy filled a bowl with the slick
yellow pebbles called Sugar Pops.
And for years
(but not for years and years)
he crunched to his heart’s content.
Later
there came times
when Jim Lockhart would start his day
with Grape Nuts (a gritty little grain).
And later still
with Wheaties (eat ’em fast, they get so soggy).
Briefly—perhaps for a month or two—
he ate Quaker Oats
and no other cereal.
If cereal wasn’t the order of the day,
eggs and bacon or French toast
would be just fine. Jim didn’t mind.
Pancakes, perhaps. Pastries. Maybe
half a grapefruit and a doughnut or two.
As for cereal, though,
Jim’s make and model never varied
until the day he traded in on something new.
Except for this one quirk,
and his habit of embroidering numbers
on the heels of his socks so they wouldn’t
become mismatched in the laundry,
the man had no notable obsessions.
When he was twenty-six,
Jim Lockhart married a woman named Lillian
who took his last name.
Lil served Jim breakfast and shared
happy years and happy dreams with him.
For her husband
Lillian Lockhart baked granola,
but she liked to pick up a Kellogg’s
Variety Pack every now and again for herself.
In the sixth year of their marriage
when, by all appearances,
things were going perfectly well,
Lillian Lockhart met and fell hard
for a divorced man named Phillip.
Around that same time, Jim Lockhart,
without the slightest suspicion
of his wife’s new friendship,
met and fell hard
for a single woman named Rose Ann.
Who left whom is hard to say.
But sparks flew.
And when the smoke had cleared away,
Lil had her Phil
and Jim his Rose
with the blissful certainty that Life
is but a bowl of Cheerios.
♦
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