(Just for a change of pace, some modern history and my recollections of it.)
On an April day, thirty-eight years ago, Mom and I were in the supermarket. In the aisle with the flour and sugar and baking supplies and spices, I took a bottle off the shelf of Schilling brand spices, a cylindrical glass bottle with the light green plastic cap and green and gold label.
“I wonder how much longer we are going to see this?” I showed it to Mom. The label said ‘Cinnamon’ and in smaller letters “Saigon.” Mom looked at it thoughtfully and said, “Get three. We’d better stock up.”
Cinnamon was the only consumer good that we knew of that came out of South Vietnam; as of the cruel month of April, 1975, there would probably be no more of it.
The North Vietnamese had overrun and taken all of the South. The last helicopter had taken off from the room of the American Embassy, and the newspaper was full of pictures, pictures of frantic people mobbing the gates, crammed into boats, thousands, hundreds of thousands of desperate people, pleading for rescue, for shelter, for succor. Their city was gone, their country was gone. There would be no more jars of “Cinnamon-Saigon” on the grocery store shelves. The war was over, but not the memories — or the responsibility that seemed to hang, for some people like an albatross around our necks.