Yesterday I was driving to Rhode Island. At one point I looked at my speedometer and noticed I was going 95 mph! But the weird thing is, I was just going with the flow. It reminded me of a saying my dad used to use when someone was going fast. He would say “That guy is going a mile a minute!”. For you non-mathy people, a mile a minute is 60 mph. In fairness to my dad, he was born in 1910. Things were so much slower then. My dad had some other sayings like referencing “JoJo the Dog Faced Boy” or “Clean your plate, think of the starving Armenians.” But those are for another day.
When I am driving my mind tends to go in all kinds of directions. Luckily, the car goes in one! I remembered how highways looked in my youth. Before the anti-littering campaign of the early sixties, the roads were littered with tons of trash. It was common practice back then for you to finish your delicious ice cream sundae in the car and just throw it out the window! What were we thinking!?
Then I remembered the bottle of Pub after shave I used to carry in my glove compartment as a teen. You never knew when you needed to smell good! Good looking Slatington girls were around every corner. Back home there were probably bottles of Hai Karate, English Leather, and maybe some Jade East.
That got me thinking about products that were big back in the day and are just not seen anymore. Ipana toothpaste and the iconic Bucky Beaver mascot was one. Happy Nut was like a stick of butter except it was peanut butter with a core of jelly. Yum! Great Shakes was an awesome drink. Every package came with a packet of powder, vanilla or chocolate, and a plastic container for shaking it up when you added milk. They tasted like a soda fountain (remember them?) milkshake. I used to drink so many of them, one after another, I remember my mom telling me that, when I get older, I am going to have stomach problems. I don’t, except for its tendency to grow quickly if I am not careful.
My mind mostly was thinking about food. Probably because I was hungry. I did get to eat at Mystic Pizza to have a little slice of heaven. A great pizza and an even better movie. One of my top five. I was thinking about how cool it would be to live in Mystic. There goes my wandering mind again!
So, in conclusion, I got to be in five of our great states yesterday. That is ten percent of the states we have. How cool is that! I realized how much I miss the slower pace of my youth. I am thankful that we, mostly, have stopped the stupid littering we used to do without thinking. Mostly, I thought about the amazing life I have had so far and how much there is to look forward to. Maybe I should see if I can find a bottle of Pub on eBay. I could keep it in my glove compartment. Just for old time’s sake.
A Semi-retired Kind of Life 