JLCP's Blog

Who among us remembers Fizzies? If you do, you must be about my age. They were a short-lived product that only a child could love. About the size of the Tums antacid I take today as a calcium supplement, they also came in a variety of “fruit” flavors. It was only after I grew up, even though I loved grapes themselves and had to hold myself back from devouring every one whenever Mom brought them home from the Giant Food store, that I registered that grape and cherry flavors taste nothing like the real fruits pictured on the package. In fact, now that I think about it, there was a parallel. The pictures were a stylized portrayal of grapes and cherries—they weren’t drawn in a way that you would ever mistake the drawing for a photograph, and yet you recognized them instantly. Similarly, the flavors were a “stylized” version of the true fruit flavors! See, I’m still having epiphanies, even at my age. For those of you who don’t remember Fizzies, you put a tablet in a glass of water, and it fizzed, making bubbles rise in the glass and gradually dissolving until you had a mildly carbonated, mildly fruit-flavored drink. The fun was in the making of Fizzies, not the drinking of it.

Fizzies was the most jazzed up drink I had when I was little. Sodas weren’t as popular then as now, and my mother didn’t buy them for us often. That’s what was so wonderful about getting the mumps. It was the one time Mom brought home bottles and bottles of soda, no cans in those days. Even though the misery of mumps landed my daddy in bed, my brother and I felt fine. Of course we looked mumpy with our distended cheeks, but we felt terrific and yet didn’t have to go to school! We were so lucky to get the mumps during the school year. We stayed home and played Robin Hood under the piano and bounced on the sofa and drank ginger ale to our hearts’ content.

You didn’t know Robin Hood lived under a piano? Well, in our house he did. Mom had a beautiful, big grand piano—the perfect hideout for Robin and me, Maid Marian. Of course, I didn’t live under the piano. I had to walk down the hall and talk to the imaginary Sheriff in Nottingham and steal back down the hall to Sherwood Forest, our living room of course, and tell Robin, my brother of course, what secrets I had spied out about how the sheriff was planning to catch him. Sometimes I got imprisoned by the suspicious sheriff, and Robin had to rescue me and bring me safely back under the piano. Then after we got well, we had to go back to school and play very quietly inside, because Daddy was ill with the mumps.

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Mumps is one of those “childhood diseases” that doesn’t really bother children but is contagious and can make adults really sick when they get it.

And isn’t mumps the one that can sterilize men? Well, that was no worry, since my daddy had already had his two children for about seven years. You see, my parents were way ahead of the game in thinking about overpopulation of the earth. Mom explained it to me when I was young, so Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb came as no surprise to me. Dad was an economist and Mom was a sociologist, so they probably only naturally thought about that sort of thing. Also, my daddy had only one brother and my mom was an only child, so they hadn’t grown up with a passel of children running around the house. My mother’s mother, on the other hand, often told me stories about her six brothers and sisters. By age ten I had chosen all the names for my six children. However, when it came time for me to marry, we had read Population Bomb, and my husband and I decided not to have any children.

That lasted for about eight years. Two things had to happen in order for me to be ready to have children, only one of which I was aware of beforehand. The one I knew about was my fear of death. I didn’t want to bring children into a life which included facing dying. It took awhile for me to decide that the wonderfulness of living overbalanced the horror of having to die. Once I got over that, I had to face another fear, namely that I would not be a good enough parent. Having a job as a teacher’s aide put that fear to rest. I saw so many messed up kids that I figured I could do as well as most parents and needn’t hold back from having children on that account. By that time, the worry of my overpopulating the world didn’t seem nearly as critical, especially if I only had my fair share of two children.

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Another memorable childhood game was tag in the summer at dusk. Mom used to let me put on my nightgown and play tag outside in our back yard with friends who lived on each side of us and so could come over in their nighties too. I felt a heightened sense of freedom. My putting on my nightgown showed that I acknowledged that my hated bedtime was approaching. Mom’s allowing me to still play outside was a treat, a gift of freedom from the customary, that showed me she acknowledged that there needed to be out-of-the-ordinary, special times. Tag soon evolved into catching fireflies, because as soon as they appeared they captured our attention and imagination. I remember the fireflies wandering in lazy patterns up and down and around our back yard as we tried to guess where they would be in the next second and grab them there. On these “firefly nights,” as I referred to them in a poem I wrote years later in high school, we played the catch and release version.

Many years later I witnessed a spectacular firefly display on the 4th of July. Friends invited us to a picnic at their home on a hill overlooking a public park. On the opposite side of their house was a small cherry orchard—very fitting, what with George Washington’s connection to cherry trees and Independence Day. After supper, my family and I picked cherries to take home and make pie. As we finished picking, dusk arrived. Hearing the fireworks beginning, we headed back around the house but were stopped in our tracks at the side of the house, where the fireflies put on their own show. Because of the species of firefly or due to the temperature, I don’t know what, these fireflies were concentrated in the trees and were lighting on and off in unison. Rounding the corner of the house, we got a triple delight. The fireworks exploded colors into the sky, a band enthusiastically played a patriotic march, and the fireflies were lighting up the branches in rhythm to the music. A celebration of man and nature together!

The next day it was time to bake a pie. Now I had never really liked the taste of cherry pies, in spite of their essential American-ness as evidenced by the song: “Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?” However when my daughter made this cherry pie, it was truly delicious. I mulled it over and realized that before, I had only had frozen or canned cherries in pies purchased from a store or restaurant. The real taste is merely reflected in these store-bought items, and it is a dim reflection. Theirs is not even a stylized flavor, but an inferior imitation. Surely, nobody who ever had fresh cherries in a homemade pie would be able to accept a pie made with canned or frozen cherries. Only someone desperate or a child who never had the real thing would eat any.