Summertime Crunch

Summer Crunch – Tim McGahren

Summertime in Georgia looms close and when you are not being overwhelmed by the peach state heat, main activities here include drinking beverages from mason jars, stupor sleeping, mopping off sweat, avoiding the outdoors, and eating (mostly dense) summertime foods. There is also a number of old-timey Georgia things we do here, but we don't share those with outsiders.

I guess summertime foods means different things to different people. It could be the meat based items like hamburgers from the grill, charred hotdogs, exotic hotdogs like bratwursts, and other foods which can be anthropomorphized for a drive-in movie intermission ad. Maybe something more southern, like BBQ ribs, coleslaw, mac and cheese, cucumber sandwiches, or pies. Anything you'd place on a red checked tablecloth have at a picnic, pool party or church revival potluck could be your summertime food. Everyone has their favorite.

When I think back to summers of my youth, memories come flooding back to me of running to a stranger in a sketchy ice cream truck, to get a brown cow, ice cream sandwich, war themed bomb pop or the ever popular warped ice cream clown face on a stick. These are all fun summertime fare. Flav-Or-Ices were a cheap perennial way to shut up annoying nuisance children for a while (green was my favorite), as was fresh fruit. Those summertime fruits like watermelons, strawberries with cream, and big juicy peaches hit the spot, as does gorging on blackberries from the limb shredding bramble patch until your face and fingers turn purple.

Maybe lemonade? That's a good one, but it's more of a drink than a food, but pure summertime regardless. I am sure you remember running a lemonade stands on the curb outside your house; that big pitcher sweating with condensation, the hand scrawled sign, waving and calling to passersby, planning to sell a hundred cups, while counting out your three dollars in change over and over, and ending up drinking most of it yourself and going home with a tummy ache. What a great memory for some, but we never had a lemonade stand, we were too busy 'camping'. Incidentally due to the Georgia heat, the best time to run a summertime lemonade stand here is in mid February.

Now, everyone has probably gone camping before, roughing it for a day or a weekend. I think our family did 'camping' for two and a half years in kid time, which can also be called homelessness, but when you're a kid you don't know. You're just stupid, so it is simply called traveling, vacation or camping. And that is where my summertime food comes in.

My summertime food, which brings back so many memories of childhood is none other than the brightly colored, sugar sweetened Kellogg's ten count funpack of individual serving cereal boxes. Ah, the variety, the excitement, the anticipation! Currently though, due to cost cutting measures and a focus on increased corporate ROI with the ever increasing cost of production, the ten box fun pack been scaled back by twenty percent less fun to eight boxes. Regardless, there is nothing else more closely associated with summer for me than those brightly colored cellophane wrapped boxes.

During those camping excursions, the parents would unpack and set up, while the children would run around and explore, or help with the setup of the campsite in a cursory way. But usually we were just told to 'go play'.

And play we did, whether it was make believe of being explorer, catching bugs, collecting rocks, talking to transient strangers passing time in a national park, or attacking the poke weed as if they were an opposing army. Nothing says parenting in the 70s like saying 'go play' while being surrounded by an endless sea of poisonous poke weed. But poke weed is great for young kids as it gets as tall as them, can take on the role of monsters or enemy soldiers, and falls dramatically when smashed by sticks. And don't worry about the strangers, we were hardy and skeptical kids, and my younger sister was handy with a knife as you will learn shortly.

After playing/surviving, the existence of the coveted funpack would either be rumored, mentioned in terse whispers by the parental units, or left out with all the other boxed food items, like pasta, hard pretzels, and cartons of cigarettes. The Quaker oats canister would always try to be part of the boxed group, but always knew, deep in it's oats it would never really fit in.

So, sometime when you returned, there it lay, it's cellophane glistening in the sun, beckoning, but my older brother knew the etiquette; after 11 you were too busy combing your hair, to act like it didn't even exist. But he was wrong, cereal was for breakfast, and breakfast was sacrosanct.

The cereals themselves had a hierarchy, a value rating, usually measured in sugar content, novelty and taste, and I think as a aficionado of the Kellog's funpack I am pretty sure I speak for most former children that the breakdown in value was correct below. (Before we begin the list, I must note the cereal window I grew up in was somewhere after the removal of Pep and before the addition of mini frosted mini-wheats to the line up of the funpack.) So here we go;

Coco Krispies – This was the king of the cereals, what other cereal makes it's own brownish choco soup? Chocolate milk as a reward for finishing your breakfast? You bet your butt it was.

Froot Loops – If Coco Krispies was the king, this was the queen, and a top choice, well balanced and fruity and enough sugar to keep you going for 24 hours.

Apple Jacks – My favorite, sort of like a mono version of Froot Loops with an cinnamon spiciness and little red bits on each crunchy ring. This was back before they added the horrible green apple jacks, ruining the concept of tasty conformity.

Frosted Flakes – Not a bad choice, and a fair selection if you were late getting up on day one, and who didn't have a fondness for Tony the tiger? Crunchy and sweet, just what the Tiger ordered.

Sugar Smacks – Sickly sugary puffed rice which would deflate in milk in mere moments. Still very yummy with that honey glaze.

Rice Krispies – It may not have tasted better, but it made noise and cool mascots, and that was a great trade off.

(Sugar) Corn Pops – Slightly edged out Raisin Bran for most kids, because it had a sugar glaze. This cereal was Kellogg's version of Quaker's Cap'n Crunch and Post's Honey Combs; squarely in that category of cereal that shreds the roof of your mouth, as if it had it's own defense mechanism.

Raisin Bran – Best of round two picks for me, and something I could do a preemptive strike on. Raisins, delicious as they are, are weird also; leave a bunch of grapes outside until they turn brown and look rotten, then enjoy? Another of the foods I call mistake based foods.

Corn Flakes – This was trick cereal number one. Why was this even in the pack for a product marketed essentially to children? I guess it is a reminded

Special K – Worse than Corn flakes, it may have had better flavor and texture, but it was healthy and therefore an 'adult cereal' and ultimately worse in the eyes of children. Incidentally I was a child, and for a child the corn flakes with the basic chicken and the Special K text, although different cereals, were indistinguishable from one another like two different piles of garbage.

Now, the process for cutting through the box required some skill. First you will need a sharp knife. Begin by handing that knife to a self assured five year old who won't let anyone open it for them. Have them saw slowly into the box down the middle to make a full length slit, and then across the box at the top and the bottom. Be careful though as cutting through the wax paper that held the cereal, cardboard fragments, and shortly the milk was a cardinal sin. There was nothing worse than precious milk dripping out of your cereal box through tiny holes and then onto you knee on a humid day.

Besides the scramble for the favorite cereal, and being caught with a poor choice and the fear of cutting through the box there was only one thing to worry about and it was an unparalleled indignity. Thankfully this mind-boggling injustice of childhood happened only rarely. That is when your father, whom you thought ate nothing but coffee, hard-boiled eggs and cigarettes would get up early and brazenly eat one of the funpack cereals! And mind you, not one of the gross adult ones, but one of the kid ones!

He was going to throw the whole thing off! There were four of us Catholic children, so that meant there was no room for error, there were only 8 good cereals, and my small mind couldn't process the audacity of my father eating something meant for kids which he merely bought and paid for. As my eyes did the 1000 yard stare watching him eat the sugar smacks, I would know I would have to get up extra early to get into the right round two position. The early bird gets the Rice Krispies, sleepy bird gets special K. Gross.

So in the absences of my father's affront, we would again go play after breakfat. The sugar from the cereal and then the lunchtime hotdogs and canned corn would give us all the energy we needed to play until the sun came down.

We'd be off doing things all day, riding our bikes around the campground, making friends with kids who might be our friends for only a week or even just a day, catching sunnies in a pond and giving them to stray cats, exploring, watching other campers in campgrounds do things like play music or throw knives. Some times we would just spend the day reading by the water or take summertime naps in tent that smelled faintly of mildew, while we cereal plotted.

Personally when not eating cereal or running around, I was too busy trying to kill myself as a child. I unwittingly tried many ways, by falling out of trees, tumbling down ravines, or cracking my head open while frolicking in a slime covered pondwater overflow culvert which I saw the big kids playing in the day before. I once even inhaled the smoke of burning poison ivy which I had just thrown in a campfire, which subsequently inflated me into the shape of those grubs you find in rotting trees.

But through all that, we came out alright. My sister didn't cut the wax paper or herself with the knife, we didn't get kidnapped, and even though the poison Pokeweed lived to see another day, we gave it our best. None of us died, and even if we did, that would just mean more cereal for the survivors.

We were happy and we didn't care if we were homeless at the time. Kids don't know. Kid's don't gauge things based on your financial status. All they care about is the being there and if the experience is pleasant, and that everyone is happy. So even in the non-ideal situation, eating cereal together is a big thing, and leaves sweet little pictures in your memory.

The most important thing about this summertime food is not the food itself. It's not if you get the Coco Krispies or the Apple Jacks. It's not the satisfaction of first pick. It is really the joy we can find in small things, the summer, and having fun. We didn't have a lot, but we had enough and some bright spots, and that was all we needed. We didn't know better, we just happy to be, and the best part of the fun pack now are the memories it is associated with.

So now even though I am older, gifts remain. There are life-long memories, my sister is still good with knives, we were all toughened up and we all came to love nature. And still now, even at my age I still enjoy sitting outside and eating Raisin Bran in the sun, even if I only get it in regular adult size boxes now.