Pretty much most of the 60,000 residents of Battle Creek, a city in the southwestern part of the Michigan mitten, engage in their own surefire practice of predicting the weather: if they smell Froot Loops in the morning breeze, it means it’s gonna rain in the afternoon. Most of the time they’re accurate. In Battle Creek, cereal is not just a breakfast staple or the weatherman. It’s an after-school snack. And a midnight snack. And kids find mini-boxes of cereal (sugary, sweet ones, of course) in their Halloween bags when they go trick-or-treating. During the summer, life-sized Tony the Tigers and Snap! Crackle! And Pop!s graze the picnic tables at the carnivals, giving away autographs and hugs to little ones. Cereal — artificially flavored toasted corn floating in cow’s milk — was the theme of the museum, and it’s what put the city on the map. The production, the distribution, and the marketing of cereal is what employs more than half the town. It is the foundation and livelihood.

Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes
(Early 20th Century)

Battle Creek was founded in the early 1800s, and according to a commonly accepted account, the name has its origin in a clash between two natives and a government land survey party led by Colonel John Mullett. The story goes that during a harsh winter in 1824, Mullett and his group were surveying an area several miles from the present city when Indians who were reportedly attempting to steal the party’s provisions attacked two members of Mullet’s party at their base camp. The survey party promptly abandoned their camp and didn’t return until summertime, but before they left, the guys pointed to some nearby running water and dubbed the area “Battle Creek.” So the city was founded by a guy who shares his last name with a popular (and quite disgraceful) 1980s haircut.

A lot of good things come from Battle Creek: Carlos Gutierrez, our nation’s former secretary of commerce (and father of the boy with whom I had my first kiss); the ardent abolitionist Sojourner Truth; Ellen White, co-founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church; Del Shannon, the guy who wrote the oldie (but goodie) “Runaway;” and Jason Newsted, the former bassist for the heavy metal band Metallica. Still, Battle Creek is best known for being “Cereal City, U.S.A,” the world headquarters of the Kellogg Company, established by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and William Keith Kellogg. They’re the brothers who invented cornflakes.

Battle Creek had a Cereal City Museum where you could get your photo on a box of cornflakes, and during the summer, Battle Creek’s residents would put together “The World’s Longest Breakfast Table,” at the Cereal Festival — a weekend community festival of local food, local blues bands, face painting booths, Harley Davidson displays, and dance recitals put on by local dance studios. The highlight or purpose of the whole event was an eat-off, annually pitted against Springfield, Massachusetts’ “The World’s Longest Pancake Breakfast.”

Battle Creek is the city my parents migrated to after falling in love, getting married and having my sister Sabina. It’s the city where, in 1979, I was born then reared, and it’s the city where in August of 1983, right around the time of the Cereal Festival, I imagine, he finally came to us. I remember it was a blood-warm day.

“Where are da keys? Where are de keys?”

From behind the passenger seat, I watch my mother press her face against the second-floor window’s rusty screen as she sharply calls out to no one in particular. “Who took da damn keys?” Momma’s lips are cranberry-colored and wet looking, and as she slides back in she snaps her pearl clip-ons to her earlobes and paces around the bedroom, trying to remember everything from her mental checklist (car seat, bag of Apple Jacks, wet wipes, We Sing Silly Songs cassette tapes, grape juice, car keys).

For months she’s known he was hers. She would never say something like he belonged to her; it was more like they were meant to be, this was meant to happen, or something along those lines. Like a feed-bag to a horse, Mom’s been holding onto the one small picture of him as proof, carrying it around as a reminder to pursue, as encouragement to keep on pushing. As hope. In the photo, she thinks her little guy looks like a concentration camp baby — round, dark eyes, flaccid limbs, pale skin and a rather large head.

“Did you check on the dresser, behind my stethoscope?” Dad calls from the garage.

We’re dressed up nice and pretty and we’re ready, waiting and obeying the imaginary dividing line between us, the back seat’s invisible boundary….

Yes, she did. The keys weren’t there. And we have got to go. “Dey not dere! We have to go!” Underneath her blouse, she attractively breaks out into small beads of sweat.

Below her, my father is puttering around an overpopulated garage, scavenging through his workbench, plucking out our neglected My Little Ponies that have been replaced by trendier pastel Cabbage Patch Kids — blue-eyed, top-heavy bald Caucasian dolls that smell like baby powder and plastic. Dad’s digging though the hammers, the jam jars full of nails; digging behind the Dutch bike, the wheelbarrow and the storage bins, looking for the infant car seat.

“I set the keys there last night,” he calls out, “right before we went to bed. Now where the heck is that baby booster?”

Dad finally discovers the cushiony egg burrowed behind the doghouse. He dusts it off and brings it over to the car — a boxy, beige Buick — in the driveway where my sister Sabina and I await. We’re being very good girls, buckled ourselves onto the hot leather seats, not fighting, which is rare. We’re dressed up nice and pretty and we’re ready, waiting and obeying the imaginary dividing line between us, the back seat’s invisible boundary. I understand the importance of today, and so does Beanie. Special occasions require our maturest behavior.

I am five and wearing a huge yellow dress. It’s satin, from Jacobson’s Department Store in Lakeview Square, the brand new mall that they tore down the most beautiful wheat field in the whole world to build. After the golden field was killed it spewed teams of deer into our yard and our neighbors’ yards, and soon after that, dead ones started to appear on the side of the highway more and more. We got used to it.

Beanie is six and a half. The dress I’m wearing belonged to her until just recently, when she outgrew it. It’s still too big for me, but I’ve always loved it so Mom let me wear it today, even though I look like I’ve just been swallowed up by a tulip, but still. Also, my bangs are too short and crooked because earlier in the week I found some scissors and gave myself a haircut, but that’s another story. The car is parked the driveway and is running, which is why Mom can’t find the damn keys.

Some time later after she had us, after the dust had settled, Mom looked back at her old motherland Poland. It was in a terrible economic state during a horrible political period and she wanted to do something to help…

What Bean and I don’t ever really think about is that once, Mom was a little girl, too, just like us. Once she had small kitten feet and ran without shoes on the carpet of a mountain’s base. She picked wild strawberries, collected sticks and played games like housekeeping station. Once Momma didn’t have two little children of her own to look after, and she didn’t even think about it. But all that was at a different time in a different country, and then she grew up. Things got bad, so she left. My mother became an American woman; she got married and had two pretty brown-haired daughters in the United States of America.

Some time later after she had us, after the dust had settled, Mom looked back at her old motherland Poland. It was in a terrible economic state during a horrible political period and she wanted to do something to help, or give something back because after all, she was living comfortably in a house with not one but two refrigerators, not one but two cars; just thinking about Poland gave her swells of grief and pity. Then, an idea. She would bring people in. She invited different people, her college friends like Jeanette, Viata, Vera, Lucia and Ducia to come live with us in the States until they could strike off on their own, like she did. But soon, this charity felt more tedious and like a chore. Mom wanted to do something bigger, make a more permanent change to help someone. She wanted to save a life more fully. Save someone completely helpless, like a little baby. She would save a child.

Before I was born or before my mother was born or before you were even born, for that matter, our midwestern American city was a bit of a phenomenon — a miraculous, magical destination renowned for its own brand of life saving. Before the cereal and the cornflakes, a doctor came to Battle Creek from New York City, raised forty children and adopted seven. He opened a holistic sanitarium, a place where rich folks and prominent Americans like Mary Todd Lincoln and Clifford Milburn Holland (the chief engineer of the Holland Tunnel) traveled to engage their dietic concerns and indulge their gastronomic curiosities.

Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes
(Early 20th Century)

Patients at the Sanitarium participated in breathing exercises and mealtime marches to promote the proper digestion of their food. They took classes in food preparation for homemakers and embraced the Sanitarium’s vegetarian, low-fat, low-protein, whole grain, fiber-rich diets. The founder of the Sanitarium also considered enemas to be a very important part of his practice, so patients participated in frequent cleansings, ones in which the doctor plied their bowels with water from above and below with a device that rapidly instilled several gallons of water in them. This was followed by a pint of yogurt — half of which was eaten, half of which was administered by enema, “thus planting the protective germs where they are most needed and may render most effective service,” the doctor claimed. No shit.

This doctor also insisted that sex drained the body of life. He encouraged the application of pure carbolic acid to the female clitoris, claiming it was “an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement.”

He believed that masturbation caused womb cancer, nocturnal emissions, urinary diseases, impotence, epilepsy, insanity, mental and physical debility, and that circumcision could remedy the “solitary vice.” And the procedure should be done without administering an anesthetic, “as the brief pain attending the operation would have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment.” This doctor, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, went on to invent Cornflakes cereal, putting the city of Battle Creek on the map.

My mother gets into the car and Dad backs the Buick out of the driveway. In a tubercular wheeze, our old four-door putters past Kellogg Community College, the sleeping jungle-gyms of Meyer’s Toy World, Farley-Estes Funeral Home and St. Phillip’s Catholic Church. It’s very early in the morning; the city’s sidewalks are still rolled up and the sun has barely shown its face. We enter the ramp of the Penetrator, which merges onto I-94 towards Kalamazoo and the Dad pops a cassette into the tape deck. Inchworm, inchworm, measuring your marigolds. Do you ever stop and think how beautiful they are?

My parents have been waiting a long time to take this drive. The wheels of the whole process started nearly six months ago, perhaps longer. They decided to adopt a baby boy from Poland. There was a woman, an unwed girl in Warsaw, who was expecting her second child, a boy. She had kept her first, but when she became pregnant, accidentally for the second time, the girl’s mother insisted she give him up for adoption because they couldn’t afford to take care of him. The expectant mother was supposed to call my parent’s lawyer when she had a baby, then the little one would join our family. In March, she gave birth, and the lawyer got the phone call.

In Poland, there’s a rule that says a mother has one month to change her mind about giving her child up for adoption, and during this time, the child must stay at the hospital. The nurses named him Christopher. One month passed and when Christopher’s mother didn’t return and didn’t change her mind, my mother’s friend Vera picked up and took care of baby Christopher while my parents pursued an American congressman to intervene on their behalf and accelerate the adoption and cut through the red tape.

And now, over five months after his birth, we are driving to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to meet this little baby boy. The drive will take about three hours.

We will drive, and soon we will arrive at O’Hare Airport. We’ll be greeted by Anthony, my mother’s brother, who wills capture the boy’s arrival on his brand new Zenith video camera. In nine more years, Uncle Tony will have divorced his wife, remarried and divorced again, then will to Mongolia for a fly fishing trip, quit his job as a physician and join the Mongolian Olympic team as theirs. But before that, today, in a few hours, Vera and the new boy will arrive in the same international airport that both my mother and Uncle Tony landed in when they became Americans.

Soon there will be another Polish immigrant living with her in the American city of Cornflakes and she will name the little baby boy ‘Julian.’ But for now, we just drive….

The little boy will have the flu and a crusty nose. He’ll have a big head, too, just like the photo told us. Beanie and I will take turns kissing him on his dimpled dumpling forehead and argue about whose turn it is to hold him. My father will cry, overwhelmed with joy, everyone will be touched and amazed. During the drive back home, the little boy will sit in the front seat of the Buick nestled between my parents, staring at Dad the whole time as if Dad came from another planet.

And soon, the little boy will get better, gain weight, gain color, his cold will go away and he’ll be christened at St. Phillip Catholic Church. We will have a little reception in the backyard under a little white tent, Mom will make Deviled Eggs. Soon there will be another Polish immigrant living with her in the American city of Cornflakes and she will name the little baby boy “Julian.”

But for now, we just drive. Our car joins the rest of the traffic on the highway and the road behind steadily diminishes into a thin, sharp line.