Quaker Oats and Broken Hearts

I was out walking the other day when a teenage boy passed by, headed in the opposite direction. Normally, I would probably barely register someone just walking by me, but there was something unusual this time. It wasn't the way the boy looked or the way he dressed. He didn't have any unusual markings. His face wasn't pierced and he didn't have a strange way of walking. He was just a normal looking teenage boy, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. However, he was carrying an oatmeal box tucked into the bent crook of his arm.

Now, carrying an oatmeal box isn't terribly strange, you might think. Certainly if the boy was coming out of a supermarket or convenience store or at least walking somewhere in the vicinty of one, then I probably wouldn't have become curious about it. But we were walking in a strictly residential neighborhood filled with nothing but single family or two-family houses. No stores anywhere nearby. And yet here he was, with an oatmeal box.

I couldn't help but be curious. Where was he going with an oatmeal box? It seemed unlikely someone had invited him over for breakfast. Usually someone doesn't call up with an invitation along the lines of "Gee, I'd love to have you over for breakfast tomorrow morning. But, one thing, will you bring the oatmeal?" Maybe he was part of some oatmeal taste test and was on his way to prove once and for all that Quaker Oats makes one damn good oatmeal. Or maybe the oatmeal inside the box had been replaced by some hidden treasure that he wanted to make sure stayed protected.

To add to the mystery, just a few hundred feet after the boy and I passed each other putting me into this oatmeal box quandary, I passed a teenage girl. She was sitting on the front steps of a house, looking towards the teenage boy as he walked away. She was crying, and crying hard. Clearly heartbroken, although I wasn't sure if the great love she had just lost was for the boy or for the oatmeal.

For several blocks I wondered exactly what role the oatmeal had played in this. Had the girl, suffering from some apparently deluded idea that the boy deeply and truly loved her, demanded he choose once and for all between her and the oatmeal and then, well, she lost? Or had the boy, in a desperate attempt to make the girl face up to a shattering oatmeal addiction staged an intervention and then whisked the offending oatmeal away where she could no longer indulge? Or maybe the boy, deeply wounded by the girl having found someone else, decided the one way to make her hurt as much as he did, was to take away her cherished breakfast food of choice.

Whatever the reason for this oatmeal box incident, it was difficult to not stop and say something to the girl who was clearly hurting. But how do you explain to a teenager that getting your heart broken from time to time is the way it's supposed to go? Every time a relationship goes wrong you learn what you want and what you don't. Every relationship's end, every broken heart leads you, eventually, to someplace better. Sometimes, that "better" is a relationship that works. Sometimes, it's gaining the understanding that you can stand on your own two feet, just fine. And sometimes, you find that on your own two feet is a better place to be.

There's a whole world out there, I would have liked to have said. And it's filled with other boys, other relationships and lots of other breakfast foods.

Over the past few days, when the curious oatmeal box incident pops into my head, I wonder what happened to that girl. My hope is shortly after I walked by, she got up, got the keys to the car and went to buy herself the biggest box of oatmeal she could find. And I hope she's enjoying every bite.