Pearl Harbor Day

Today is the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

A couple years ago, my mother (who was born in 1931) shared an extraordinary story as follows:

In the fall of 1941 my mother started making homemade bread every Saturday. She used yeast on the first recipe, but after that she would save a starter, a piece of dough. Of course we had no refrigeration, so she would just take the starter dough and put it in a bowl in the cabinet. The next week she would use the starter dough to make a fresh batch of bread.

My mother stopped making bread. I was ten years old.

Needless to say, Pearl Harbor didn’t just affect Hawaii. It also affected a tiny little town in the bayous of Louisiana, and a 10-year-old child’s memory of a neighbor boy who died for our country.