by Tumbleweed_Tex » Fri Jul 09, 2010 7:25 am
TIME WARP
The peas and corn I planted in Renee’s little campground veggie garden did so well this year, I decided to stop in at the feed store yesterday...just to see if Bubba Earl was gonna order seeds from the same company next year. I found him gainfully employed, cleaning out the old antique Coke cooler.
It's one of the old chest types, with a lift-off door on top and an old fashioned bottle opener screwed to the front. Having nothing better to do while we talked, I pitched in to help, carefully removing the plastic bottles and placing them in a big wooden box on the floor.
Along about the time the conversation turned from purple hull peas to the latest edition of the Grizzly tool catalog, I reached way in the back of the cooler, down in a little slot between the side and the bottom, and came out holding an original, sixteen ounce glass bottle of R.C. Cola. HOLY SCHMOLY!!!
The bottle design itself shed light on the fact that somehow, through the years, it had been pushed back, lost, overlooked, hidden, disregarded, and forgotten...to the tune of at least thirty years.
Now...as any self-respectin' Antique Cowboy knows, a genuine, original, sixteen ounce RC Cola in the tall slender glass bottle ranks right up there with Katherine Ross in cut-off jeans and a half-buttoned denim work shirt. And since I knew for a fact that Bubba Earl kept a box of Moon Pies stashed behind the counter in case of mid-afternoon hunger attacks, like a zombie I confiscated one and eased on outside to the truck, lost in a heavenly time warp.
The younger generation doesn't know that the door latches on a forty year-old pickup truck are designed to double as bottle openers for the old, pry off, bottle lids...or, for that matter, that there is a time-honored way to partake of a Moon Pie and an R.C. Cola.
First, one takes two huge bites of the cookie, and just as the throat begins to scream in dryness after the swallow, one turns up the bottle and chugs as much of the cola as possible. The sensational change from choking dry to eye-watering burn is all but erotic.
It took about six seconds for me to sense that something was amiss, and another four or five gasps for air to realize that at some point, eventually, after several hundred months, sugar, in liquid form, will, and does, turn to alcohol. Really good alcohol. Disinfectant grade. Once able to breathe again, I just sat there, staring at the almost empty bottle, nibbling the cookie, contemplating life, wondering if RC alcohol was poison, and if the new Grizzly planer on page 72 was big enough to handle 3x12 rough cyprus planks.
Bubba Earl is one of the hardest working people I know. At some point yesterday afternoon, after hiding my truck keys so I wouldn’t kill anyone out on the highway…not only did he paint the feed store a lovely shade of passion pink, he re-roofed the entire building using 1943 Studebaker hubcaps. Hoping to expand and diversify his business, he imported several varieties of exotic zoo animals, including giraffapotamuses and ephanants, and turned them loose in the parking lot.
He even put in one of those new-fangled, executive restrooms on wheels…with padded seats and windows...and decorated it to look just like a deputy sheriff's patrol car. I don’t remember much after that.
Tex