Sitting hunched over at my kitchen counter at 10:30 p.m., I find myself eating a bowl of Cheerios with cold skim milk, and I remember that this is something my stepfather did most every night in the threadbare kitchens of my childhood, and there were many. But the last kitchen I clearly see him in is the one on 34th street, in our old neighborhood on Milwaukee’s Westside. He is sitting at our Formica table pushed up against the wall on one side of the kitchen lit by a dim overhead light in the middle of the ceiling. He sat there several times in an evening: after work with his legs crossed, a cigarette in one hand and the other wrapped around a cup of tea in front of him; again at supper with the rest of us; or later, like as not before bedtime, he would sit alone in front of a bowl of Cheerios, the milk carton still standing on the table. Soon thereafter, he’d go up the back stairs to my parents’ bedroom down the hall or later, to his own bedroom next to the front stairs. This was after my mother began complaining about his snoring.
There was always something a little lonely about the way he sat there in the later evening, usually alone, eating his Cheerios with some gusto as if they something special when they were only a boring bowl of dry cereal. Or at least that’s how I felt at the time. These days, I feel kinder to this memory, and especially because now, it is my turn to sit in the dim light before bed or when I have awakened at 2:00 or 3:00 AM and eat a solitary bowl of cereal. Mine varies a bit as his did as well. Sometimes, he ate Wheat Chex or Special K with the big red K on the front of the box. I, on the other hand, have tried Total and other supposedly more nutritious cereals but come back to Cheerios as the only cereal that can satisfy this late night yearning. What, exactly, am I yearning for? I don’t eat dry cereal any other time, certainly not for breakfast when I eat either an egg or cooked oatmeal with various additions I have heard are good for you: raisins or cinnamon and some honey or brown sugar. But when I am hungry at night, it is only the Cheerios I go to, as if there was a kind of comfort in that yellow cardboard box.
