Remember the days you
could go to the grocer with your mother and rely on the cereal aisle to have
box after box brandished with the words, and I’m paraphrasing here, ‘Free Toy
Inside!’ Few and far between these days.
I can remember hiding a box of
Corn Pops under my bed overnight to be sure to get my hands on the sticky
football that would tumble down any wall you chucked it at. (I was young,
naive, and my brother already had one, so, fair play)
Furthermore.. do you
remember the days when that fun toy was actually hidden, imbedded within the
sweetness of the cereals for you to dig your hands in and excavate your prize?
These days if you do luck upon a box with a toy inside, it is sealed in its own
baggie, safely outside of the cereal bag itself.
Now..I understand the modern
desire to sanitise everything, but spelunking the box through masses of flakes
or loops or puffs or what-have-you was one of the funnest parts of childhood.
You earned that free toy inside. Allow me to tell you a story..
When I was four years
old my mother brought a box of cereal home from the crunchly club.
The crunchly club is
what, in my childlike innocence, I had dubbed “The Country Club”. A grocery
store that once resided in the space that is now a Gold’s Gym just down the
mall from Donatelli’s, near Century College. I’m sure many of you know the
spot.
As I recall I spent many-a-time side tracked from play, repeating those
words, “crunchly club”, to my parentals, who assured me they weren’t laughing
‘at’ me.
The aforementioned box
of cereal was a big box of the Cap’n. Cap’n crunch. So delicious, then and now.
Of course, being the good old days, this box contained a free toy inside. A
robot..which perhaps did something that I can’t recall. I wanted this robot.
Taking the box to my
room I assured my mother I just wanted to look at the box.
“Just don’t open it”
she said.
I closed the door. My
first attempt to open a box of cereal culminated in an explosion of miniature
yellow biscuits all over my childhood room.
I immediately started
weeping uncontrollably, much like a four year old, which I was.
Frantically,
and in a panic, I started cramming handful after handful of cereal pieces and
carpet fibers into the mangled bag and box, chanting a mantra of ‘mom is gonna
be so mad at me’ ad nauseum.
When all was done I
confessed my transgression to my mother between the dry hiccupy spasmic
inhalations that only come to children after the most intense bouts of sobbing.
I never got the robot.
To this day I’m not sure what it did, if anything,aside from being plastic and
robot-y.
The cereal was likely
tossed. Nobody should be eating that many foreign particles and carpet fibers.
