Orange Crush, don't fail me now

The depressing thing about being with a health nut is that I am slowly coming around to his way of eating. Brown rice used to remind me of being poor as a kid. So I hated it. Now I love it. But now I can't eat Girl Scout cookies because their preservatives leave a gross taste in my mouth.

So I don't really look twice when I go into our medical clinic room, which houses the staff fridge, to get my lunch. On the exam table are 5 boxes of different kinds of sodas. Picked over in the last few months, what's left are overly sweetened fruit juice cocktails, Diet Coke, and Orange Crush. Not my speed.

But today I took an Orange Crush. I remember drinking it when we'd go into town with dad, riding in this:

(but rusted green, and with a passenger-side door that refused to stay closed going around corners.)

If we were with dad, we were going to the auto-parts store or gas station. There was Markley's Service Station on the outskirts of town, so we could take care of business without even going inside the city limits. The station had a soda machine. The old-fashioned kind you rarely see anymore, with the long narrow door on the side where you'd pull the bottle out of metal teeth.

The soda would be dusty, greasy, and icy cold. It was amazing. I still think the best soda is from a glass bottle.

I just don't want that memory to be tainted by a real sip of an overly saccharine soda.