Sunny Days

When we were little, we purchased every consumable product used in our house through a family direct-marketing business. They are great products, so until I left for college, I was utterly unversed in the available brands (and gradiant qualities) of toothpaste, laundry products, paper towels, window cleaners, disinfectants, hand soap, snack foods, etc., etc. My favorite magazine advertisments when I was small were ones for the business, where it would show an ordinary kitchen scene (or some other room) and ask, "How many Amway products can you find? We see 100." I could find them all.

Anyway, Critic's Choice was our brand of cereal, and Sunny Days was the equivalent to Kix. We had those quite rarely, but the big favorite in our house was Happy Days, which was like Lucky Charms but with more wholesome (read: "icky" to the 7-year-old palate) cereal pieces mixed with the marshmallows. Many mornings, my brothers and I each played a solitare (and nameless) game of marshmallow elimination. If your spoon was just wet enough with milk, and you did it just right, you could get up to 4 or 5 little marshmallow pieces to stick to the bottom of your spoon. Once we'd gotten all of the icky cereal pieces out of the way, we'd touch the bottom of our respective spoons to our floating mass of marshmallows. Any that stuck were immediately eaten. For me, it was a compitition between the colored shapes. I was always rooting for blue rectangles to make it to the end, longer than the pink triangles or the yellow circles. Maybe there were green squares, too. Oh, and Fruity O's or whatever they were called were another morning staple.

Wow, all this came up in my typing just because today is a wonderfully sunny day in this chunk of the East Coast, and I said so in the title. Beware of writing titles before whatever they are titleing. The weather is cold and crisp. (Today, for the first time, my windshield was covered in ice.)

In Our Lady,
"Elenor Kate Teflon"