For my niece's 9th birthday, I picked her up from school and we spent the afternoon at my house. First, we had snacks and she got to pick whatever she wanted to watch on TV. She chose some horrible kids' show I'd never heard of that seems to be about to boys stranded on an island in the sky. During a commercial, she was munching her cinnamon-sugar toast when a Cocoa Puffs commercial came on.
"That bird really likes Cocoa Puffs," she said. "He's crazy about them."
"Yeah," I said. "He's cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!"
She looked at me sort of funny, a clear 9-year-old skepticism in her eyes. "Do you watch much children's TV...?" she asked.
"No. None at all," I said.
"...then, how did you *know* that?"
"Oh," I said, feeling like a possessor of wisdom and age, "He's been cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs since *I* was a kid."
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| Me, 1979 |
It's good to know, I suppose, in an age where so much is transient and digital and Twitterfied, in a world where car doors are opened remotely and "dialing" a phone or "rolling" up a window using a handle are now as foreign to my niece as an icebox was to me in my childhood, that the message of sugared cereal promotion remains constant across the generations. Will my niece's niece know that that bird is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, too? Only time will tell.
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| My niece, 2009. |
