Soda Pop

When we were very young, my brother and I used to ride our bikes along the sidewalk, over patches of weeds that grew between the cracks in the pavement.  We would press our bare feet hard into the peddles as we raised our bodies off the bike seats as we rode faster, laughing because it was summer and there wasn’t much else to do.  We would ride to the liquor store around the corner from our house; outside there was a vending machine where we could buy cans of pop for thirty five cents each.  We called it pop then.  I call it soda now.  And now, in that little town, there are still vending machines selling pop for fifty cents.  Such things don’t exist anywhere people call pop “soda.”

Back then, when soda sounded pretentious or old fashioned, my brother and I would count our nickels and dimes and slide them into the coin slot, awaiting the sound of the cans of Cherry Coke falling free from the machine, eager for the sweet cold taste of that very first sip. They were our little luxury. 
In the evenings we could go to the city park and buy bags of popcorn for seventy five cents.  The popcorn came in the same ACE Hardware bags as the nails and screws that I’d seen my mother purchase.  Ours was that kind of world.  Cheap and hard.  Where enough was the goal and in the meantime there had better be loose change and something to laugh about.