Going Crackers

I have no reason for inserting this photo except that I just found it. It's a little figure in my backyard - used to be the base of a birdbath - that I discovered the first spring in our house when I was tidying up our secluded, tangled Secret Garden-esque retreat. There's another little cherub that was tipped over with just its little hand poking out of the ivy. Kinda freaky.

Anyway, I pulled out my "raw material" notes from my sister's ramblings earlier this year. Here are her recollections of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

We were at the Buckingham Apartments in Arlington during the Cuban crisis. One day, mom came home quite agitated. It wasn’t a payday but she said we needed to go to the drugstore.

We bought a transistor radio and batteries.

Then, we had a treat - a grilled cheese and soda at the counter. That was the kind of treat we usually only got on payday.

Soon after, big military trucks came to our apartment building. Our building had been designated as one of the shelters. The trucks brought food and water for our complex - cases of crackers and barrels of water.

The storage area was fenced in with chicken wire and had a door and a lock. Mom was trying to explain that we were going to war. I always associated this with the turquoise transistor radio.

Well, those crackers stayed there forever and it eventually attracted mice and rats.

In 2000 when people were freaking out about Y2K I thought about those boxes of crackers from when I was a little girl. So what'd I do? I bought crackers every time I went to the store. I had at least 10 boxes at one point. Then they got stale so I fed them to the birds.