Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War by Deb Olin Unferth

McDonald's

I had food in my heart and mind that morning. My parents had said they’d pick George and me up at the border and take us anywhere we wanted to eat. I wanted to go to McDonald’s. My father thought that was funny. Part of his story for a long time was how the first place I wanted to go when I came back from fomenting the Communist revolution was McDonald’s. Hey, to me at that moment, McDonald’s looked pretty good. We’d seen McDonald’s in Mexico, of course, and Honduras and other places, but we hadn’t been able to afford it. Now, approaching the border, I was thinking about that lighted menu board. I was thinking about how I already know what the food I ordered would look like. I knew what the French fries would look like, what the containers would look like, although I’d never been to that particular McDonald’s. I knew what I’d get when I got a sundae. That seemed like a neat and attractive trick to me now. There would be toilet paper in the bathrooms. And soap. There were the little songs on TV, the McDonald’s songs that people all over the world knew and I had sung when I was a kid, the Big Mac chant, the Hamburglar. George was asleep beside me, had slept through the last seven hours of desert. “George, wake up,” I said. “We’re going to McDonald’s.”