SWISS CHEESE & CHEMISTRY SET
Swiss cheese and a chemistry set stand out to me from childhood. I made a fuss about Swiss cheese after seeing its vapors floating on "Mighty Mouse." It was a popular television program in the late '50s and early '60s in St. Louis. Mighty Mouse would literally float on its smoky aroma. I knew it had to be good! I pestered Mama to buy Swiss cheese incessantly. So, she did. I took a bite! Yuk! Did not like!
Around that same time, I became enamored of chemistry sets, from the shiny pages of BOY'S LIFE MAGAZINE . Their glitter, clutter, gave an air of scientific knowledge and sophistication that appealed to the nascent scholar in me.
Once again, as with the Swiss cheese before it, I pleaded and pestered my parents, until I got one for Christmas. What joy! What happiness! But, looking at my round cardboard box, I was still secretly disappointed that I had not gotten a big metal one with a fancy microscope. But I opened it, anyway. I quickly grew bored of reading its trite formulas, warnings, instructions and simplistic outcomes. I immediately tired of its tedium and abandoned it to the reservoir of exhaustion: trash can.
My point here is that children may ask, children may get; but joy is capricious; happiness mercurial in ones who need not buy; but just ask; the very ones who do not know that advertising gimmickry is incessant , insistent, unending!
Anyway, "Merry Christmas" to you!
