Captain, my Captain ...

Today, as I'd promised myself earlier in the week, I stopped off at the grocery store before getting my morning coffee. I picked up two boxes of “Captain Crunch with Crunch Berries” cereal - one for me and one for my barista, John. This kid was gonna have Crunch Berries once in his life, by God, even if I had to spoon feed him myself.

I had a very late start, so the place was empty. John was restocking the cookies and snacks - and I nodded to another employee I know well, Kathy, who wordlessly started making my drink. (Again, the bonus of being so predictable is that my embarrassingly large order doesn't need to be repeated time and again.)

John turned to the register as I placed the box on the counter. “Here – now you can taste what I’m talking about.” He was taken aback – and it took him a minute or more to realize that I wasn’t offering to share – I was giving him the box. In fairness, I was giving the whole staff the box to share. Cereal to adults in their earlier twenties is like … like Viagra to men in their 50s. No one may not admit to wanting to try it, but hey … if the bottle/box is already opened, ya’ may as well give it a test to see what all the fuss is about.

Anyway, I returned home, and decided to have a serving of the cereal myself.

At this point, I should note that as a child, I FULLY enjoyed the various bowls of sugar that were named things like “Lucky Charms”, “BooBerry”, “FrankenBerry”, “Corn Pops”, “Cocoa Krispies”, etc. As a card-carrying member of kiddo-hood, I KNEW that if the milk didn’t change color, I was being fed something that might actually … gasp … be good for me. Sometime around 9 or 10 years old, ‘tho, I took notice when a father of a best friend was pouring himself a bowl of cereal. There were no marshmallows, and it didn’t look to have much sugar (or flavor), but you should have HEARD the crunch. Since that time, my cereal of choice has been “Grape Nuts”. Anything that made that much noise first thing in the morning … enough to make my parents glare at me and bother my sister … was aces in my book.

So anyway, I pour myself the bowl of Captain Crunch w/Crunch Berries and …

Yanno how everything in your childhood, to some extent, probably ISN’T as you remember it? How it’s been fixed, or is “new and improved” (over, I suppose the “old and inferior” WE had when we were enjoying the product)? Well some marketing genius decided to add extra colors to my Crunch Berries. It seems that hot pink wasn’t good enough – now there’s purple, and green and … blue. Good lord – there are BLUE Crunch Berries. Plus the milk hardly changed color at all.

Oh – and I realize now that I cannot blame General Mills for this atrocity. It seems the Captain is a member of the Quaker Family.

Screw it – I STILL may buy General Mills stock … just as a protest.