The Nagasaki Slice

by Mark Morelli
October 17, 2005

It's Saturday. Here's your morning: Deposit a check, drop off library books, pick up dry cleaning, return videos, shop for groceries, fill a prescription. (You can't read the rest of your chores list. The ink has been blurred by your tears.)

If you've got a kid in the car, especially one strapped in a car seat like an astronaut, then there will be one chore on that list, hopefully the last one, when the kid gets so whiny and irritable that you, too, will snap faster than Kevin Spacey channeling Bobby Darin!

You will holler and jab your finger at the child. You'll screech in the kid's face, or even nuttier yet, into the rear view mirror! Adults who have no children will glare disapprovingly. People with kids will express empathy. If you feel this explosion coming on, drive to the nearest Wal-Mart. There, you will become lost in the cacophony of other parents screaming at their kiddies.

"Don't You Look At Me Like That, Er, Not YOU, Sir"
You never thought you'd crack in public, let the world see your fangs. Yeah, but guess what? Your kid would rather be home molding clay, swinging on swings or bonking the remote over her sister's head, anywhere but looking at your evil grimace in the rear view mirror.

You try to squeeze too much into a day, into the idea of a day. As the story goes, it took the likes of Christ to pull off feeding thousands with just a few loaves and fishes. Who are we to think we can add some sort of cosmic Hamburger Helper to the idea of time and quality and stretch it out. Who are we to have produced The Odd Couple II; Godfather III; Rocky IV and Caddyshack II or the last three seasons of M*A*S*H and Friends? History will look back on us not as the pioneers of technology but the fools who thought they could outwit time (or jump sharks.)

You and me and Neil Simon and Francis Ford Coppola and Sylvester Stallone and everybody else bit into the Nagasaki Slice, the one you shove into your mouth just because you think you might like the taste of it even though you've already eaten five and you're stuffed to the gills.

The name comes from the arguable notion that dropping an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, in addition to Hiroshima, was unnecessary. This Atomic Age phrase becomes especially poignant in the Digital Age when we schedule every day like it's our last.

Maybe Even ONE Shot of Wild Turkey Is Too Much...
The Nagasaki Slice idea came to me after scarfing down pizza like a bloated Roman senator simply because I liked the taste. I could've stopped at two.

This lesson in gluttony could also have applied to the night when the second shot of Wild Turkey, and not the seventh, went down like honey. Especially because I was drinking to the loss of a girl who broke up with me whose name (and now, even her face!) I cannot remember.

The hangover was unforgettable!

Feeling Like Christopher Columbus When I Finally Discover the Peanut Butter Aisle
Too often I've been the guy screeching at the kid who is screeching because she is fed up with being pulled out of and strapped back into the car seat six times in one sunny afternoon. My blood's boiling by the time the library books are returned. Something's wrong when a trip to the pensive public library makes my neck red. Waiting for my prescription to be filled, I wonder why am I not in a hammock in the backyard, which would probably provide for me a better medicine than what is in those pills.

The grocery store aisles are jammed like the interstates at Christmas and just one backtrack across the Super K for some goddam peanut butter and I feel like I've missed my exit.

Every Saturday is Christmas Eve (And Like George Bailey, I Just Want to Jump Off a Bridge!)
Yes, our mundane Saturdays are becoming more and more like Christmas shopping, which Anna Quindlen described as "a joyless hateful pursuit." In the rear view mirror I see the sniffly face of a bleary kid with a sweaty back and a headache. An eight-year-old should never have a headache!

I am lucky to have come of age just as the blueprints for the first area shopping mall were drying on developer Edward J. DeBartolo's desk. Instead of Nagasaki Slices in my bygone Saturdays, we sipped Bradbury's Dandelion Wine amid green apples and mowed lawns, hiking the railroad tracks on the outskirts of town to break in our new sneakers.

Our Saturday errands, if we went along at all since our mothers shopped during the week, were spent rolling around the back of the station wagons reading Archie comics. Our version of the Nagasaki Slice was pushing our luck in making our mothers call us three times before we came in for the night.

This Hectic Present isn't even Life in the Fast Line. It's Life in the Turning Lane. What a waste of a hammering pulse, trying to make a white-knuckled left turn before the yellow light turns red.