All the Small Things...
Truth brings...
A six-pack of Coke made me cry.
I was at Market Basket, a grocery store, with my wife Dana and our son Dylan. Snow was falling outside; bad 90s pop was playing on the store loudspeakers.
We were in the soda aisle waiting as Dylan deliberated (Starry or Sprite, a tough choice for him), and I remembered the store sold small, old-fashioned six-packs of glass-bottled Cokes. Picking them up and placing them in the cart (or "carriage," as they call it here), a vivid childhood memory tumbled out of some dry storage in my mind where it had barely aged since the 1970s.
It was a simple memory, but it carried the weight of all a little boy's love for his mother. I was standing in the soda aisle at Mom's favorite H.G. Hill grocery store at the corner of Murfreesboro Rd. and E. Thompson Lane, asking her why she always got the small Cokes, and she was telling me how they were the perfect drinking size.
Mom disliked excess. She balanced my Dad's big personality with her quiet demeanor and delicate tastes. She balanced his impulsiveness with a cool head. She loved small coffee cups, mini-Coronas, and 8-oz glass bottles of Coca-Cola. Mom also said Coke didn't taste good after you drank six ounces.
I did not realize until I was in my 40s how much I was like her that way. Dana was teasing me one day because I rarely use our large coffee mugs. I will search for a six-ounce cup I'd had for years rather than use something more suited to a hearty bowl of soup than coffee.
My response was that my cup was the perfect size. I probably said it with the exact tone and cadence my mother would've used.
So, a six-pack of bottled Coke made me cry today because it brought Mama back with such warmth and light. It was as if she were somewhere nearby, and I might step into the next aisle and see her grinding her favorite coffee beans in the store's machine, as she would do whenever we bought coffee at Hill's
I have always found those I loved and lost in their small things. When my best friend died in 1986, his parents said I could take anything meaningful to me from his room. I took a small red Frisbee we'd often tossed for hours at a nearby park on summer days. But what also stuck with me was seeing his watch and wallet neatly placed on his desk. The watch face was cracked but still ticked away the hours and minutes since his death. A jacket hung on his chair, swaying in the breeze from the old fan he kept beside his bed. It was as if he'd just left for a moment and would be right back. He was just a room away, perhaps, ready to come and coax me into joining him on some silly errand any minute.
And when I was cleaning out their house after Dad died, I lost hours simply reading through all the (mostly) mundane business and military records he'd kept. It was just fading and brittle old paper, but those pages carried so much of his life in them that I couldn't put them down.
Such glimmers sustain me on days like this when the grief of remembering is almost too much.
I think those we love never leave us as long as we remember that they aren't just in our memories, but in whatever small totems, tchotchkes, or ephemera they leave behind.
I'll have a rum and Coke with dinner tonight. I'll pour the cola from a small glass bottle. I'll drink a toast to Mama from a perfectly sized rocks glass her namesake, my daughter Margaret, gave me for Christmas.
I’ve decided this Substack will be devoted to what I can only call a serial memoir. Future posts will be paywalled.