God Awful Things

I spent 12 years of my life in Columbia, Mo. We called it soda, and according to this map, a county over and I would’ve been on of those hillbillies saying “Pop”, back in those days we had a lot of variety, Apple Slice, Mandarin Slice, Strawberry, Pineapple, who knows which ones I’m forgetting.

Then I moved up to Iowa, where they all said “Pop”, ridiculous. My cousin Rager, while still in diapers, had figured out how to open cans of Mt. Dew with a butter knife while he was still in diapers. Of course, this may also be the only recorded case of a baby rotting his baby teeth before his adult teeth grew in (this is a true story). His father, Kyle, has such sensitive taste buds he could tell what bottling plant had made his Pepsi (not a Coca-Cola house), my aunt wouldn’t have to slightly tear open the cases of Pepsi to make sure they were silver topped (as opposed to gold), such subtleties in the water used in bottling missed by the common man.

I don’t remember what they said when I loved in Tampa, but that is probably due to my fixation at that time of stealing comic books and 5th Avenue candy bars.