The World Around Me: Box tops

Cereal has been around for more than 130 years. For much of its existence, it has been packaged in boxes. These boxes have come in all sizes during that span, from the double-capacity boxes sold at warehouse clubs to the mini-boxes, offered as a breakfast option at inexpensive hotels.

However, regardless of size, all cereal boxes have opened the exact same way. With the top two flaps glued together, a potential cereal eater must merely break that seal and fold open the flaps. One of the top flaps even, for as long as I remember, has a lip that fits into a corresponding slit in the other top flap to secure the flaps after use.

I have always simply used my index finger to slide between the flaps to break that initial seal. Sometimes a little two much cardboard from one flap sticks to the glue, sometimes one of the flaps themselves tears under the pressure of my finger. And, on occasion, I suffer a cardboard version of a paper cut. But one way or another, I get the box opened without catastrophe. I suppose most people use the same method and a small minority might use a knife or other kitchen utensil to separate the flaps.

Then there's my grandmother, bless her heart*. I've never seen her take martial arts training, but every morning I've woken up at her house and gone to the kitchen for a bowl of cereal, I have found this chilling image. Visit after visit I've been too late to the scene of a breakfast crime.

Like a cicada crawling out of the ground, mounting a tree and molting without anyone noticing until they find its discarded skin, for years my grandmother has taken unsuspecting cereal boxes home from the grocery store, mauled them mercilessly and left people like me to pick up the pieces. I can't even interlock the flaps after carefully shaking cereal into my bowl. Bunching the box top together like a piece of laundry I'm not sure how to fold is all I can do.

I don't know how. I don't know why. All I know is I want to see my grandmother go Bruce Lee on a box of Honey Bunches of Oats** before one of us dies. So consider this a PSA to spread awareness of cereal box abuse.

*It's always easier to make fun of someone after the phrase "bless his/her heart."

**I will say, Honey Bunches of Oats bags within the cereal box seem to be the most temperamental of all cereal brands. For whatever reason, my success rate at pulling apart the two sides of the plastic bag is roughly 54 percent. It refuses to separate all the way into the corner, forcing me to either pour the cereal from a mangled spout or try my luck on the other side and either have two openings or an unsightly large one. Thus, I eat Raisin Bran.