Experiencing a Post Shredded Wheat bonanza

BY Pat Van Dyke

Today, my family was excited to see UPS arrive and leave a large box from Walmart on our front porch. Bill quickly opened the box and was faced with 14 boxes of spoon-sized Post Shredded Wheat! He doesn’t like Shredded Wheat at all! Here’s the story – Pastor Pete and I eat Post Shredded Wheat (and only Post and only spoon-sized) on a regular basis to keep us regular. Face it, it’s an old person’s cereal!

Our local market carried spoon-sized for years, but a couple of years ago Stater Bros. stopped stocking it. We then found it at Walmart and bought it there for a couple of years, but a month ago, Walmart stopped stocking it locally, so I went online and found it for the same price as in the store.

I began to order it and then noticed that one box was $2.88 but the shipping was $5.99; however, if you had over $35 of items in your cart, Walmart shipped it free!  Thus, 14 boxes later, I had free shipping! What a deal!

Next, I had to find a place to store it. We already have a place in the garage to store our extra stuff from Costco. We have roll after roll of toilet paper, hundreds of Tide pods and tons of paper towels. Now, as we add our cereal to the mix, we can survive the legendary Canyon Lake 100-year flood!

Pastor Pete wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as I thought he would be until I explained to him the reason behind the 14 boxes. I assured him that my Dutch business sense had kicked in. The Dutch have a history of being shrewd businessmen. For centuries, they have bought low and sold high.

Recently, I learned that in 1636 a Dutch businessman sold a house for ten tulip bulbs. I could have bought the entire city of Chicago with the tulips blubs that Pastor Pete has planted over the past 50 years!

There is one item that I think the Dutch should have left on the loading dock: Brussel sprouts!  In the 16th century, the Netherlands began to produce Brussel sprouts and is now the leading producer of Brussel sprouts in the world. My only question, “Why?”

Other things that I don’t understand about my background is why my parents and Pastor Pete’s parents used certain words to describe things that had nothing to do with what they were describing. Our parents spoke Friesian which is one of the two languages that are spoken in the Netherlands.

For example, when my father was really upset with me, he would call me a sipel. I was told by my mother that it was a terrible word and I should never use it, but after being married for a few years, I finally had the perfect opportunity to use it. I shouted in frustration, “You are such a sipel.” Pastor Pete started laughing and said, “Why did you call me an onion?”

Pastor Pete’s mother’s frustration with him when he was a middle schooler led her to call him a ferfelend postsegel which is translated to an uncooperative postage stamp, the kind that you lick and then it gets stuck to your fingers and you can’t get it off. For me, this translation was perfect! I knew him then and indeed he was a ferfelend postsegel.

I have known this uncooperative postage stamp my entire life and have been blessed every moment. By the decisions that Pastor Pete made regarding where he would serve as a pastor has allowed me to have experiences that I would have never expected.

I have had experiences that challenged me in ways I never thought were possible. Writing for The Friday Flyer for the past four years is perhaps the most amazing experience of all. Keeping up with deadlines has been a challenge but writing about the lives of individuals whose lives have blessed so many has been amazing.

As I close this chapter of my life as a photographer, journalist and columnist, I only wish that many of you, my readers, could have given me my grade for English in my junior and senior high school years. Perhaps, I would have earned a grade higher than the persistent D that seemed to follow me every year.

What have I learned the past four years about life? Laughter is healing. Laughing at yourself is life-changing!