Saturday, August 30, 2003
The Dairy Bar.
At Ninth Street I parked on Washington where Mr. & Mrs. Spears had retired to a corner house and ran a dairy bar and restaurant of sorts there during the years after WWII. I never knew their given names. We called her Mrs. Spears… he was Pop.
Pop: You’re a smart kid, Johnny, – suppose you woke up one morning and everything in the universe had grown to twice its size. Would you know the difference?
Me: Everything? Pop: Everything. Me: I don’t think so. No.
Pop: That’s right, Johnny, that’s Einstein’s Relativity Theory and he proved it.
Kids met there on summer days or Saturdays to form up for sandlot games or long bike rides or to just sit in front of the fireplace on one of the chairs Pop bought from the Penal Farm. Today they would call that furniture style rustic. Log legs, planed table tops, cane bottom chairs with log arms. What a great seat they made for a 9-year-old to contemplate relativity (his over-simplified explanations fit our young minds) or physics (the paper cone placed in the fireplace would not burn until the water inside it boiled away) or the great economic question of the day – What’ll you have?
I was of the Royal Crown Cola and a Holloway All-day Sucker school of kid economics back in 1949. Quality issues aside, the 12 ounce R.C. lorded over the new 8 ounce Pepsi, the 7 ounce Seven Up and the 6.5 ounce Coca Cola.
I’d like to tell Pop Spears that: everything in the universe has more or less doubled in size since 1949 and that I’m still trying to measure the differences, his corner has improved in his absence, his house and yard are neat and bright, a deck has been added in the space where he used to keep the returnable bottles between the house and the old Dairy Bar. And I’d like to tell him that I knew that he knew where some kids who cashed in a carton of empty coke bottles so they could buy an R.C. and a Holloway All Day Sucker got the empties – from the place where he stored them.
