So when I spotted the frozen standoff the other night, I went inside and did what I do on many cold, dark winter nights when I’m home alone for supper: I enjoyed the ritual of Cream of Wheat.
Measuring out two cups of milk and one-third cup of mix, I fish the hard plastic egg turner out of the drawer to scrape the bottom of the pan so the milk won’t stick during the cooking.
I scrape steadily, picking up the pace as the range coil glows orange and steam rises from the milk.
When the foam of the boiling milk starts its sudden rise, I pour in the Cream of Wheat, and the granules act like a boil retardant, knocking the foam down as I continue to scrape.
Finally, the boiling subsides, the coil fades to black, and I can walk to the corner cupboard (where the brown sugar waits for me on the bottom shelf of the Lazy Susan) assured the milk won’t burn.
While the mix was thickening and had begun to slowly bubble the other night, a few things struck me about this simple pleasure of life.
First, I recognize it clearly appeals to the creature in me.
When I add extra milk to the mix after it’s cooled to get the right consistency, I’m getting ready for a pleasure like the one a lizard must feel when its sticky tongue has snagged a damsel fly and it feels the first satisfying crunch of wings between its teeth.
I hope my eyes don’t look in different directions like the lizard’s while I’m gumming down my Cream of Wheat, but that hope is probably just vanity.
What’s more amazing to me is that in our vast universe of black holes, giant dwarf stars, meteor storms, supernovas and space whose tape measure is marked in light years, there is room, too, for these kinds of simple pleasures.
People tend to get serious about questions regarding the purpose and origins of the universe. But to me, the wonder of it beyond thinking is right there in my cereal bowl.
The only known source of the iron in my cereal: an ancient star that imploded, then exploded and seeded the universe with iron.
The way the iron got into the cereal: Glaciers scraped the elements from the bedrock, then left it in the soil for the grain plants.
And when I sit at my kitchen table alone on a winter’s evening taking pleasure in eating what warms my innards, I take that same life-sustaining element into my body.
E=mc² is one formula for explaining the universe.
But there are others.
As I eat my Cream of Wheat, a lizard crunches the wings of a damsel fly.
A massive earthquake in Chile slightly alters the rotation of the earth on its axis.
The universe is going about its business.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.
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