797: Although the threat . . .
At Home with the Glynns, Chapter 1
1
ALTHOUGH THE THREAT of atomic warfare hung over us constantly when I was a boy in Babbington, New York, clam capital of America, we didn’t think about annihilation all the time. Sometimes we worried about war and rumors of war, it’s true, but at other times we had other thoughts: we fell in love, pondered the meaning of life, and went about the mundane business of living it, and grown-ups tried to calm the fears of their children by living ordinary lives and doing ordinary things—going to work and dusting the furniture and making us eat our peas.
The peas favored in my family throughout my childhood and adolescence were the Troubled Titan brand, the same brand served in the cafeteria of the Purlieu Street School. They were gray-green, smoothly spherical‚ without the dimples or wrinkles of, say, raisins, and so uniform in size that they might have been an artificial foodstuff manufactured at the Troubled Titan’s factory—replicas of a single master, an archetypal pea—rather than something that sprang from dirt and formed in pods. They arrived at the school already cooked, in enormous cans, each can wrapped in a sleeve of silver paper, imprinted with a picture of the Troubled Titan. They were what was called a “heat ’n’ eat” type of food. Behind the scenes, in the kitchen of the cafeteria, someone opened the cans and poured the contents into one of the large rectangular warming trays that fitted into the steam table. Ready in a jiffy!
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 797, Mark Dorset considers Projects: Fallout Shelter: Stocking It from this episode.
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