The immutable laws of physics and Froot Loops

Several decades ago, my father-in-law came out of a public restroom and said to me with a grim shake of his head: “Whoever put that toilet paper on the roll has no understanding of the laws of physics.”

I hadn’t needed to use the restroom, so I had no idea which way the paper had been installed — with the end of the paper hanging over the top, or lying under the bottom of the roll—but his comment worried me because I had just married his daughter, and I wasn’t sure if my at-home toilet-paper installation met the basic standards he had set for giving his daughter away. He hadn’t yet come to our home to use our restroom, but when that time inevitably rolled around, I would hate for him to look at me forever after and wonder how long it would be before a physics flunky like me lost my grip on gravity and shot off into space.

I can only assume I was doing it right, because my wife — who had grown up in his household — never recoiled at my TP installation method. Then again, love can make a woman do crazy things.

I never forgot his grim head-shaking tissue-issue. Up until that moment I had always assumed that if physics had a law governing toilet rolls with the end looped over the top, it probably had other laws that ruled over toilet rolls oriented in almost any other direction, so his pronouncement seemed rigid and closed-minded to me. But I was young, and what did I know? Maybe he was right. Maybe I had been doing it wrong all along, violating some essential law of physics, and maybe someday gravity would get sick of giving me a pass all these years and just let me go.

For the record, I have always been an over-the-top-of-the-roll kind of guy. I’m not sure if it has anything to do with the laws of physics, or if it comes from my Midwestern Methodist upbringing, but doing it that way just seems right. If you’re an under-the-roll sort, that’s your choice. I guess some people don’t mind taking their chances with gravity — or with heaven and hell.

Anyway, I thought of my father-in-law’s comment recently when his daughter (not the one I married—the other one, her sister) came to visit and mentioned to me that she had heard of a cookbook whose every recipe is made with leftover cereal milk.

And I said to her with a grim shake of my head: “That’s just wrong.”

She disagreed, saying she loved drinking leftover cereal milk and thought it would taste great in a lot of recipes, but I kept shaking my head grimly.

“If you drink the milk after all the cereal is gone, then it’s not left over, is it?” I insisted. “It’s like dessert after the meal, and dessert isn’t just leftover food.”

“Well,” she said, “these recipes aren’t for people who drink the milk after they eat the cereal. They’re for people who pour the leftover cereal milk down the kitchen sink.”

“Those people are idiots,” I said, with the same certainty my father-in-law felt when he made his long-ago potty-paper proclamation. I don’t know if he was right on the physics point, but I know I’m right about how your breakfast should — and shouldn’t — end.

Dumping cereal milk down the drain is just wrong.

If you don’t want to take my word for it, just visit any Midwestern Methodist church at the end of services on a Sunday morning and poll the sensible people funneling through the door. Ask them what they do with “leftover” cereal milk.

They’ll tell you: “Leftover cereal milk? Unthinkable.”

There was probably a Commandment about it on that second stone tablet that Moses dropped and shattered on his way down the mountain, leaving him with just the first Ten. Go ahead, check your Old Testament if you don’t believe me. You won’t find a single verse about Moses, or Abraham, or David, or anybody else dumping their cereal milk down the kitchen sink.

Proof that it’s not just a stupid thing to do, but also wrong on a biblical scale.

I mean, think about it. You eat your favorite cereal because you love the taste of it, right? So what kind of idiot would pour on so much milk that it washes off half of the flavor, and then flush that tasty cereal milk down the drain without so much as a slurp? It’s not just careless, wasteful and uneconomical — it’s sacrilege.

But apparently there are plenty of people out there who have been doing that every morning of their silly, sinful lives — enough of them that somebody is now seeking atonement by selling recipes to use up all of that “leftover” cereal milk. And according to my sister-in-law, if you go online and Google “cereal milk recipes” you’ll find unsolicited testimonials from people who swear that every one of those recipes is the best-tasting thing they’ve ever eaten.

Well, duh! It’s cereal milk, you big mooks! And cereal milk is made for slurping. You don’t even waste that last drop oozing down your chin by sopping it with a napkin. You capture it with your finger, then lick your finger clean.

In fact, cereal milk may be the best part of breakfast, made all the more heavenly by the anticipation of finally getting to it after gnawing through all that labor-intensive cereal. If you think of your cereal bowl as a metaphor for life, then you know what the milk is at the end.

And that ambrosial flavor of those recipes? That’s the sweet taste of finally following the path of righteousness.

Because any philistine who would flush luscious cereal milk down the drain probably lives in some moral wasteland like Sodom, or Gomorrah, or California, and they probably need a lot more than a recipe book to save them.

Like maybe a toilet-paper instruction manual.

Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.

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