Pop

There’s a bottle of Orange Crush in my early memory. My uncle Rob, a park or maybe a ball field and a tall, cold, orange pop. I’m probably four at the time. And the vision I have of it now is about: the size of the bottle in my hand, the heat of the day, trying to manage drinking with out the bubbles splashing my face and how much I idealized my uncle.

Or an earlier recollection of the neighbors next door to us in Tennessee. They were an older couple, whose children where grown or they hadn’t had any. I remember sitting in their kitchen learning those same management skills. It’s a Sprite bottle this time and maybe the first without a nipple. There’s a drinking game they play in Germany, where a half yard of beer is passed around the table in a glass boot. The object is to not ‘get it in the face’ as a bubble forms in the toe and rolls around , sloshing if your not careful. There’s singing and those with wet faces buy more boots then those with dry, but it’s that same skill.

And later, my father would add food color to sodas served to me in rocks glasses. In his own glass was probably a Dewar’s and water. But in the evenings we would sometimes have our cocktails and relax with the tube.

Water, some sweet flavor, and a little carbonation, a soda pop. What joy lies in those little bubbles. The crisp crash on the back of your throat, the flavors of fruit, cola or ginger on your tongue, these have always made me happy.

There was this soda works in Detroit (no not Town Club) called Atlas. They went belly up in the mid nineties, but they made good pop. Liters of their ‘Brownie root beer’, or their ‘Black Cherry’ like liquid hard candy of the finest quality, found their way into the every day lives of the hipsters in Hamtramck and greater Detroit. Or their ‘Bull Dog ginger beer’, made with real Jamaican ginger, that they were always out of because they were waiting for a ginger shipment.

Vernor’s is another great ginger ale. Nothing makes a coney dance on the plate like being paired up with a Vernor’s, or a ‘Boston Cooler’. And it was what you got when you had a tummy ache, flat or warm or what ever wives tale the wives in your family subscribed to. It’s because of this that a lot of people I know don’t like Vernor’s , because they associate the smell with being sick.

When I lived in Atlanta I learned how to get along in the cult of Coca Cola. Where the word “Coke” could be used in place of the whole subject. Instead of ‘pop’ or ’soda’ you could use “Coke” to mean any flavor. A waiter/patron conversation might go, “I’ll have the B.L.T special and a Coke” says the patron, “What kind” asks the waiter, “A diet Sprite, I guess” replies the customer. But how ever you order yours, just don’t ask for a Pepsi. And then there are those that start the day with a Coke instead of coffee, you’ve seen um, laughing at you while your waiting for the drip machine to finish a pot. Sipping on large paper gas station cups full of ice, claiming your the weird one for drinking that hot, bitter, sludge.

What happened to the soda of the past. When it was cola nut, herbs and fruit juices with real sugar, and not complex corn sweeteners, that flavored smaller portions that were aimed at refreshing the mind and lending the body a bit of pep. This style of pop has gone the way of the Dodo. Replaced with countless soft drinks touting new super science blends of ingredients the likes of which should scare you. You might think of the humble soda’s radical transformation as the first casualty of an agriculture so invested in corn, that science has worked hard at including it in everything. Hell, there’s even a reliable plastic now, made from corn, that you can make into biodegradable cups to fill with pop.

As I get older it becomes easier for me to rail against the changes that have occurred to my childhood favorites. The fact that they have become something else or have ceased to be all together allow me to rant in forums like this one. But that offers very little solace, to me, when I see quality and pride traded in for political correctness and a fatter bottom line.

That’s not to say that everyone in the industry has lost it’s way. There are some fine companies, like Jones Soda and Blue Sky to name two, who are making a go at competing with the big boys. Basing their products on ‘real sugar’, and adventurous flavors, their kind may be our only hope of reclaiming past soda greatness. And  I encourage their support.

In fact all this pop talk makes me wanna go get some. Maybe a big ol’ orange. Talk to ya later.