For the Price of a Cup of Coffee
When my kids stare into the pantry and complain that we don’t have any snacks, my jaw drops open. We have cereal, crackers, chips, yogurt, pickles, and countless other delicious treats. I love to snack and since I grocery shop once a week, our kitchen is always flush with goodies.
When I was young, my parents would buy groceries on payday, that’s once every two weeks. During that second week ‘round about Wednesday, the choices would be meager. You would start thinking about finishing the remnants of the various cereals. My mom wouldn’t let us open a new box until we finished the old one first. You would have to choke down some stale, powdery Froot Loops in order to gain access to the fresh box. I would get so hungry, there were times when I would resort to buttering a piece of Hardtack. That was actually the name - Hardtack. I couldn’t really describe it from memory, so I looked it up: “Hardtack is a type of cracker made with flour, water, and sometimes salt. It is hard, unleavened bread eaten by soldiers during the Civil War.” Basically, a soldier sitting against a tree with a musket on his lap, in a blood-soaked battlefield during the mid-nineteenth century would be eating the same thing as me, leaning against the sofa watching The Brady Bunch.
Mind you, we were not beefy kids. It wasn’t as though our diets needed monitoring. I, especially, was skinny - so thin that in the right light, you could see my inner workings, like a soft-shelled reptilian egg. If I stood in the kitchen, backlit by the sun, you could clearly see my morning Frosted Flakes working its way through my digestive system. I would then put my bowl down, step outside, and let a gentle breeze carry me off to school.
Snacks were precious to me. My parents would let us have a treat after school as well as before bedtime. Our nighttime snack would consist of crackers or cereal and a vial of soda. I still associate soda with bedtime. Caffeine has no effect on me. I can now drink a can of Pepsi, lie down in bed, and sleep for twelve hours.
When my parents weren’t home after school, all bets were off. The first week after payday shopping yielded a glorious bounty - graham crackers with butter and jelly, bananas in milk, Cream of Wheat with sugar, and peanut butter on Saltines (still the best snack ever conceived). There was no rationing. We were so blinded by the bright product packaging and the cabinets brimming with sugary delights, not to mention the Darwin-esque competition of two equally ravenous brothers, that the good snacks were gone before the first weekend. The following week, you could find us plagued with self-loathing, sitting in front of the TV, snapping off another piece of Hardtack.
