My preferred way to eat chicken noodle soup as a child was with so many Saltines crushed into the bowl that it ceased to resemble soup altogether. It became something closer to porridge, or gruel, which delighted me. On fall Sundays after church — after being gently held to account for my sins via felt puppet shows, tiny plastic cups of Welch’s and the Lord’s own cracker, the communion wafer — my mom would have a pot of chicken noodle soup waiting to warm on the stove. I’d change into play clothes, take my bowl and begin the solemn work of crushing an obscene number of crackers into the carrot-flecked broth until the spoon could nearly stand upright. In my imagination, I was, naturally, a Dickensian orphan enjoying my one hot meal.
Crackers were never nondescript to me. They were the quiet architecture of certain meals, the thing that made everything else feel complete.
