A few ice crystals this morning took me back to my old schooldays. The frozen bits emerged after I opened a Diet Coke bottle that had been positioned too close to the freezer in the mini-fridge.
There was no ice before I unscrewed the cap – there is some sort of physics phenomenon that causes a liquid near freezing to suddenly turn to ice when air is introduced. Maybe you can look it up and explain it to me.
Back when I was a boy there was a soda machine at the Texaco station in McAlester, within walking distance of my house. The machine’s thermostat must have been set low enough that the same phenomenon occurred when my friend Craig and I would walk down for a bottle of pop and pried the cap loose.
It was a dime, back then. That sounds crazy to admit these days, and no doubt is proof of my geezer-hood.
“Yessir,” the old man wheezed. “I recky-member when a cold bottle of sody was only a dime. Yessir – ‘member it like it was yesterday! Hee-hee!”
Back then, on a hot summer evening as the sun was lowering itself behind the little mountain we called “Old Baldy,” drawing a mouthful of that deliciously cold drink was a taste of pure heaven. There was something about the ice crystals that bunched up at the neck of the bottle before they finally slid onto your tongue. There was something about being small enough to be comfortable sitting on the curb like it was a king’s throne and watching the last traces of the day disappear. There was something about having a good friend to enjoy it with, sitting there talking about nothing and everything. Important stuff that was so insignificant as to remember none of it.
But that bottle of pop with its cluster of ice crystals floating on top… That image and those moments are frozen forever in my memory – to be recalled only when that rare soft drink is chilled, just enough.
Cheers!