Jack Armstrong?!

 

“Mom!”  Elliot came down the stairs in a flurry.  “Mom!  You’ve got to get me a breakfast that’s worth a million!”

"What’s that?”  Elaine asked.  “We’re not made of money, so I don’t that we can afford it.”

“I’m guess he wants to eat scrambled eggs for breakfast,” I said dryly.  “Fortunately, our chickens don’t know the price of eggs these days or we’d be up a creek without a paddle.”

“No,” Elliot said with disdain.  “The breakfast I’m talking about is swell!  It has all of the heat burning units of hot cereal, but it tastes great!”

“What is it?”  Elaine asked with a little curiosity.

“Wheaties!”  Elliot said dramatically.  “You can have them bananas one day and the next day have them with blueberries!  It’s like having a different breakfast every day of the week.”

I shook my head.  “You’ve been listening to Jack Armstrong, haven’t you?”  I asked him.

“Yes,” Elliot said.  “I’ve heard all about the dragon’s eye ring and their journey to the Philippines.  I wouldn’t have known about Wheaties otherwise.”

I chuckled.  Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, was on the radio 80 years ago.  He had various adventures, crossing the ocean with his friends, Betty and Billy Fairfield and their Uncle Jim.  Through all of his adventures Wheaties, the Breakfast of Champions, was there to encourage the listeners to eat more of the breakfast cereal.

I remembered listening to Jack Armstrong when I was a boy (on cassettes – I’m not quite old enough to have heard it when it was actually on the air).  I was dreadfully disappointed when the last cassette ended on a cliff hanger with Jack and his friends approaching a Philippine village.

Disaster was never far away from Jack, although fortunately, he always survived.

Elliot is probably our child who is most susceptible to the wiles of advertising.  He sees something in a promo, and he thinks his life would be infinitely better if he simply had this item.  So it was that he succumbed to 80-year-old advertising.

It is easy to laugh at such a response.  Adults don’t give in to the sort of advertising.  They are simply too smart.

And yet…

The world around us is constantly telling us that happiness comes in the form of material things.  Maybe it is the right house, or the right truck/car, perhaps it is a piece of technology like a brand-new phone or game console, but regardless of the object, if we could only get that thing, our lives would be so much better.

Solomon said, “Whoever loves money never has enough, whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income.  This too is meaningless.”  (Ecclesiastes 5:10 NIV)

Elaine did get Elliot a box of Wheaties and he ate them for several breakfasts, but his life doesn't seem to have changed much since that monumental purchase. 

Maybe the price of a Wheaties box is a small price to pay for the discovery that true happiness doesn’t come in a box.  True happiness comes from knowing Jesus Christ and walking with Him.

"Do you like my hat?"

 

"Do you like my hat?"  Elise asked, holding two dolls over her head in an appearance that could pass for a fascinator in the Royal Family.

"I do not like your hat!"  I replied.

"Good-bye!"  Elise said and began to laugh.

"Good-bye!"  I said.

While this may sound like the sort of father-daughter interaction that is bound, in a few years, to result in a sequel to the book "Spare," the truth was far from it.  I was only following the script my three year old daughter expected of me.

True fans of hifalutin literature will, perhaps recognize the quotation as being from the book "Go, Dog, Go!"  This classic of children's lit, by the Shakespeare of that genre, P.D. Eastman, contains a myriad of short vignettes about a group of dogs.

One recurring story line involves two dogs, one of whom has a different hat each time.  She asks the first dog if he likes her hat.  The second dog never does like the hat in question until, in the bewitching last scene, he is enthralled with the hat in question.  At this point the two dogs drive off into the sunset together.

It is interesting that the ultimate peak of love in this story revolves around learning to accept someone else's fashion choices.  It sort of glosses over all of the other aspects of knowing someone and learning to love them.

Love is something so simple that even a child can understand it.  It is also so complex that even a Mensa level genius would struggle to explain it.

Love is the thing that lets a man gently answer the same question from his demented wife for the twentieth time in an evening.  It is the essence that lets a Dad play along with a script from "Go, Dog, Go!" simply because his three year old daughter finds it funny.

Love give us patience with the interminable.  It give us a desire to heal broken relationships.  It gives us an understanding of others in our lives who are confusing -- even when we never learn to like their hats.

"Thanks, Marie!"

"Thanks, Marie Callender for ruining Thanksgiving Dessert!"  Sharon Weiss wrote in her post, with an accompanying photo of a completely blackened pie.

Apparently, this upstanding lady bought a pie for her Thanksgiving dinner.  She opened it and followed the directions on the box precisely.  The only problem was that when the pie came out of the oven, it looked a little like Icarus did after he flew a little too close to the sun.

Sharon was obviously distressed at these results and the lack of a dessert for Thanksgiving dinner.  I suppose her family had to fall back on cranberry jello salad as a not-so-great, semi-sweet menu item to eat at the end of their meal.  Either that, or just eat Cool Whip from the container.

Oh, the travesty of such a situation!

It turned out that none of this was Marie Callender's fault.  Sharon began burning lots of things in her oven, but before she wrote a devastating post about General Electric (or whoever manufactured her oven), her husband investigated and discovered that she had somehow turned her oven from Fahrenheit to Celsius.  That meant that when she set her oven to 375 degrees, her oven was trying to achieve the mystical temperature of 707 degrees Fahrenheit.  

For those of you who aren't bakers, that's actually a very hot temperature to bake a pie.  It is no wonder that disaster ensued.

The book of James tells us, "Let every man be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath, for the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God." (James 1:19)

There is a tendency to flame up in anger when we feel that we have been offended.  This can result in a harsh Facebook retort, abrasive text, or e mail that we later regret.  Maybe it even comes out in an online review.

It is far better if we take the time to calm our anger.  Even if we are in the right, it isn't helpful to be angry and certainly posting in anger will only bring regret.  It may well be that in the end we discover that the other person was no more at fault than Marie Callender was for Sharon Weiss's pie fiasco.