Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [23]
Sunday’s “boughten” cereal represented a rare concession to expedience. When you are struggling to get six or eight kids ready to leave for church by 9:30 a.m., and some of those kids are developmentally disabled or run-of-the-mill recalcitrant grumps (Your Author), you are happy and wise to line up the cereal boxes like books on a shelf, toss out spoons and a stack of bowls, and let the rug rats have at ’er. And man, we could get through some grain. One time we were watching television at Grandma’s house and a Total cereal ad came on, the one where comically stacked bowls of competitor’s cereal are juxtaposed with a single bowl of Total cereal, and the announcer says something along the lines of, “You’d have to eat fourteen bowls of Frooty-Os to equal the nutrition in one bowl of Total,” at which point my brother John turned to me with resolve and said, “I’ll take the fourteen bowls.”
Ours was not a loud family, but once Sunday morning breakfast got rolling, the action was steady, with the sifting sound of cereal sliding from the wax-paper lined boxes and the high-tension ping of spoons against the rim of Corelle Ware dishes. I loved to look at the pictures on the boxes while I ate, and dream of the day I would save enough box tops to get a real jet airplane. When at an early age I began to learn to sound out words, my Sunday morning cereal time was the source of great strides in reading comprehension. I’d read the boxes side upon side. By the time I was in kindergarten I could spell niacin and riboflavin with dispatch. In my sullen years, I would arrange three cereal boxes in the manner of a cubicle and seclude myself for a good read.
If I can continue to support my growing family on a freelancer’s wages, I will have my wife to thank. Early in our courtship Anneliese picked me up for a date in a battered Honda and apologized, saying she was too cheap to spend money on a new car. Unbeknownst to her, I found this comment the equivalent of a red satin nightie. Although she eventually sold the car and upgraded to our current $1,000 van, her frugality remains constant. In the shower today I bumped into a gigantic thirty-two-ounce bottle of shampoo (as a middle-aged bald man walking, I find thirty-two ounces of shampoo to be profligate in the extreme). I also noticed that the special unsecret ingredient in this shampoo is placenta. Anneliese goes in for some alternative concoctions, but even so this seemed a bit much. Upon closer inspection I saw there were several price restickerings on the bottle, with a final markdown to $2.29, and then I understood. Still, I skipped the placenta extract and went with a mini-bottle I scored from a Super 8 outside Wichita. Free, and it put a fine sheen on my scalp.
Matrimonially speaking, being of one mind on money matters really smooths the sheets. While other spouses go ballistic over nasty surprises on the credit card, I am reduced to waving the Visa bill and barking, “$7.95 at Goodwill?!? That’s the second time this year!” When the winter winds whistling through our overworn upstairs windows forced us to turn on the baseboards and spiked the electric bill, Anneliese talked my contractor cousin out of a couple sheets of pink Styrofoam and trimmed them down to fit. Now our entire upstairs is bathed in the soft pink glow of love and free insulation.
Like most well-worn tropes, the idea that a man looks to marry a dead ringer for dear old Mom is probably only half accurate at best, but when I go to the