The Bowl Is Back!

Scott got his cereal bowl back tonight. The blue bowl is sitting on the ground under the Glacier sign in the picture. So many things have happened to Scottie's favorite cereal bowl from childhood - I will give you some details:

1. The bowl was stolen from our house when we were in Branson. Someone "broke in" and went to the kitchen to look for the bowl and discovered that all of our dishes are blue. Cobalt Fiesta Blue, to be exact. After a small panic, someone looked up Scott's Facebook reference to the blue bowl, the invader found it, and then the bowl was off.

2. Various staff and church members took pictures of the bowl. They photoshopped headlines onto newspapers propped up in front of the bowl, kind of like terrorists propping up current newspapers in front of their captives. They took a picture of one of our senior church members with the bowl on her head, requesting her demand for old church hymns to be sung in worship. Her face was hidden, but I know it was Sue.

3. One of our members decided that taking Scott's actual bowl on the road was a little risky, so she decided to make a stunt double. She found a brown bowl in her cabinet that was the same size, but it had a handle on it. So, after 10 hours of grinding down the handle and a paint color match at Home Depot, they had a stunt double. The day after making the bowl double, this same woman went to visit her mother in Tennessee and discovered that her own mother had four bowls exactly like Scott's cereal bowl. Oops.

4. The bowl makes a transAmerica trip with the teenagers and the youth minister. (If you did not already know, only a youth minister would go to such lengths to pull off something so bizarre.) The Cadillac Ranch in Texas, the St. Louis Arch, Colorado mountains, Arches National Park in Moab UT, Glacier National Park in MT, Tabletop Mountain in Alberta CA - we have pictures of the bowl everywhere it went. Kind of like that little garden gnome in the Travelocity commercials, Scottie's cereal bowl was a talisman for 20 juniors and seniors. And we have a scrapbook of the whole trip - people eating out of it, posing with it, jumping mountain bikes over it.

Scott is glad to have his bowl back. The painful divorce of his breakfast ritual is over. And we will be sure to take it with us on all our future trips.