Gene made exactly two requests for dining for this weekend: 1) Cracker Barrel for breakfast and 2) the Mexican place near my office for lunch, dinner or linner. Today we had breakfast at Cracker Barrel – actually, it was also near my office. Hmm.

Anyway, we’re sitting at the table and the wooden thing that holds little ads for what’s on sale in the Cracker Barrel Crap-a-torium and dessert specials is sitting next to me. This month’s little placard is for the origin of the restaurant’s name. It was some such malarkey about crackers in barrels and when the barrel was empty you could put a checker board over the empty barrel and play or have a conversation or whatever. And it concluded with something so geeky, so shit-eating-grinny, like “And we wish things were still that way” or “We try to keep things that way” or “Some things never change.”

I thought about this a moment and told Gene that I thought the real origin of the name of Cracker Barrel was that during the depression, there was no money, so people had to wear barrels. And, also during the Depression, the races were still segregated, so the barrels for white folks were called….Cracker Barrels!

Ha ha ha. Gene looked around and said, “Hey, you’re right, this place is a barrel full of crackers!”