I spent another day at home today courtesy of the Throw-Up Disease, which seems to have marked me for triple duty this winter. Oh, sure, it’s officially spring and we had some seventy-degree weather last week, but Sunday and Monday were in the ’30s and there was snow. As friend Lisa points out, you might get lovely spring weather but there’s always a chance of an Easter Snow.

Actually, God loves to bait Richmonders. Invariably Easter Morning in Richmond is damp and icky. You get up for church and fear the worst — but by the time the priest says, “Ite, Missa est,” the weather is warm and lovely. You can walk in the Parade without fear of wet or chill; I firmly believe that this is because God himself is a Richmonder and loves a good joke on his neighbors, but wouldn’t really mess around with one of their favorite annual events. I can’t wait for this year’s Easter Parade in Richmond, because I’ve a smart new jacket and I’m dying to show it off.

Now that I’ve taken that little detour, I come back to my original plot, which involved a survey of my book holdings. The Throw-Up disease is relentless and doesn’t allow one to migrate far from the bathroom, but I figured that if I’d be consigned to the house I’d better do something productive. So, I waded through several stacks of books, trying to categorize them and wondering if it would really be worth the effort of instituting a Dewey Decimal system. (It wasn’t.)

I found, particularly, a number of my childhood books. A few volumes of the Bobbsey Twins (insert vomit noise), some ’70s touchy-feely crap, and a lot of things handed down from my parents. A delightful ’30s Mother Goose; some WWII-era pop-up books.

The combination of those pop-up books, which show West Point and our own beloved Annapolis, with the ’70s stuff sent me on a nostalgia trip into my own childhood. I was able to look back upon myself as I read them for the first time, either on Conkling Street or in Burning Tree Road out in the hinterland. I remember thinking that the little paper soldiers looked quite gallant, and I remember that I spent most of my childhood wanting nothing more than to be a soldier when I grew up.

And I thought as well about idyllic childhood scenes in Patterson Park and at the Grand movie, and running after the ice-cream truck.

That was when I was struck with the memory of Bomb Pops.

I loved Bomb Pops. They were rudimentally shaped like torpedoes, and were red, white and blue. They were a big hit, of course, in the 1976 era. I think they cost a whopping quarter; more than the cheapo Popsicles (a nickel apiece) and Dreamsicles (a dime) , but less than suchtreats de luxe as Strawberry Shortcake Pops and the Mint Chocolate Pops that had an actual Hershey bar buried within (35¢ each, if I recall correctly).

But now we’re really at war again. I don’t approve of it, and never will. A lot of people seem to think that by blowing holy hell out of Iraq, we’ll somehow eradicate terrorism in the world. Never mind that Iraq’s connection to global terrorism is tenuous at best. Never mind that this effort will do nothing but make the United States even more demonic in the eyes of most adherents of Islam.

All I could think about today were those damned Bomb Pops and how they seemed so cool and patriotic when I was six years old. Now something with a similar shape could blow the sweet, goofy smile off the face of one of my dearest friends, who when last heard from was not far from Uum Qasr, a city of which I’d never previously heard. I wonder if anybody in Uum Qasr has ever heard of Baltimore? The Oriole stove has been pressed into overdrive turning out “Baked Goods That Travel!” to be sent to various friends “Over There.”

Dear God, let this foolishness end soon. I never thought that I’d want the ’70s back, but now I do. I want the guileless Kool-Aid flavored summer days back. I want to be able to buy a Bomb Pop in Patterson Park without having to think about an empty but flag-draped coffin before the altar at St. Elizabeth’s.