Tuesday, November 11, 2014

some flavor soda

During a summer visit to Racine, we attended the 4th of July parade and some kind of picnic. I don't know which year it was and the memory is rather vague. It seems the memories of two or more 4ths of July might be mixing together. There was the visit in the seventies, when I was quite young. There exists a very seventies looking photo from this visit.
Seventies Racine
Family visit to Racine
One memory, probably from this visit, is going down to Uncle Bill and Aunt JoAn's on Main Street. In their back yard, or perhaps a neighbor's back yard, were some picnic tables with snacks and possibly barbecue. There was also a large metal tub with wooden handles. This tub had been filled with ice and soft drinks of many kinds. Most of the ice had melted by the time this memory formed, and many of the drinks had been taken. My brother and I saw enticing sodas at the bottom of this lake of icy water and the first moment of plunging our hands in to grab one felt glorious against the sticky heat of summer, but the next moments went from uncomfortably cold to numbingly painful as we pushed the bottles around looking for the best one. The memory fades a bit after we each captured our quarry, except that we left the area and opened our sodas and mine was the best soda I had ever tasted. I don't recall the flavor, perhaps it was a cherry or strawberry soda, maybe creme soda or some kind of ginger ale. I was amazed; I had no idea soda could be that good. We drank our sodas and ate some food and did whatever kids do on the 4th of July, and after some time we resolved to go back and get another amazing soda. I think we had wondered down the street a bit, and there was some difficulty with unexpected fences and blind alleys, and I remember feeling a bit uneasy that perhaps we couldn't find our way back. We eventually did, but everyone had left the area. The tables had very little desirable food left, only crumbs of cookies or chips in the bottoms of bowls and perhaps a few lonely hot dog buns and half empty bottles of mustard. It had gotten a bit breezy so napkins and paper plates were fluttering around in the wind and the sun had fallen behind a house. The tub of drinks had very little ice left, but the water was still freezing cold. The choice of sodas had diminished significantly. The thought of plunging my hand into the tub for a soda promised only damp chill and shadow, and moving the bottles around in the bottom of the tub revealed only unappealing looking unknown sodas, none of the amazing kind I had gotten earlier. We both selected one of the thus far unwanted sodas and took a deep thirsty draft, almost retching at the terrible taste. For perhaps for the first time in my life, I abandoned a bottle of soda after only one unwisely large and optimistic gulp. As good as the previous soda had been, this one had been twice as bad.