PanningForGold

The other day I had a freezie and suddenly I was 10 again.

Perusing through wthe grocery store in search of something different for our BBQ party my wife picked up a pack of the of the dyed, artificially flavored, frozen sugar-water sticks, I looked at them, looked at my wife, I sort of shrugged and in the cart they went.

The next night I took two out of the freezer snipped off the ends handed one to my wife, I sat down put the end of the frozen treat in my mouth and WHAM! I was 10 again.  I was not excepting such a visceral response. I was expecting nothing more than eating a flavoured icicle and getting a cold headache.

But suddenly it was lunch time at elementary school and a few friends and I were running down the street to Hampstead Park and with a dime or three.   We would get a pack hockey cards, (complete with gum) some candy and on the hot days, we always got a freezie.   Now I’m 44 years old, living a lifetime away from Hampstead park but I swear, just for a second there was a rip in space and time and I was back to that place. 

It is funny what triggers these responses.  The smell of gasoline brings me back to a country house where we used to spend our summers when I was a youngster,  we had a black speed boat, with a red interior, we used to fill the two little red gas tanks that were tucked behind the back seats.  The smell of gas just takes me back to filling those tanks, takes me back to the lake, the peninsula at the end of a friends property.  I’m not sure where the peninsula fits in with the gas but it does.  I still remember talking into the CB on the boat I believe our call letters were XM52101.  Don’t ask me how I know this or why gasoline triggers these memories.  And really I don’t care why, I am just glad they do.

And in case you were wondering, we kept the freezies to ourselves and never even offered them to our guests, but if anyone really wanted one they were in plain sight in the freezer, not that we advertized that little fact.