O Captain My Cap'n!

As part of an inside joke during our trip to Boston, Sheherazade was kind enough to buy me a bit of the "forbidden fruit" otherwise known as Cap'n Crunch. Anyone who knows me well also knows this particular cereal played an almost mythic role in my childhood. Our family would go grocery shopping only once a month at the army base BX about 45 minutes from our house. The one "child concession" was a single box of Cap'n Crunch. In an unregulated state, the cereal would cause us kids to get up at 3:30am in order to have bowls of cereal before the competing siblings could scarf it down. Many fights in footsie pajamas followed suit. As a peace-keeping measure, we ended up getting a ration of our share of the cereal in a cleaned-out Country Crock butter tub (this was the early '80s; the recycling involved was revolutionary). My goal was to successfully hide my ration --the crawl space was my go-to spot-- and then roll out weeks later with my Cap'n goodness while my greedy siblings, who had long ago eaten their rations, had to sit silently, glowering into their bowls of Shredded Wheat. Nice. Revenge is a dish served in little yellow squares.

As a kid, my dream of adulthood was a pantry full of Cap'n... Crunch Berries, Original, Peanut Butter, all good. I never factored a Molly-figure putting a ban on this and filling the house with Special K and Cheerios. As luck would have it, Molly left town right after we got home from Boston. So it was just Finn, me, and a box of the good stuff. As the saying goes, "When the cat is away, the mice will play." It is with great paternal pride that Finn's first sugary food was Cap'n Crunch. Let the long glorious road to food addiction begin...