SNOW CONES AND SLUSHES

Sickly sweet juice. Shaved iced. Drippy. Shirt stained. No wonder people of all ages love snow cones.

I love the feeling of gulping too much ice to allow your throat to swallow. So there the lump sits. Agonizingly slow to go down the gullet. The DQ had the frozen slushes before the Blizzards, and a friend of mine in high school, David Atkinson and I used to drink them as fast as we could to get headaches. We probably never did it more than a couple of times, but it's there in my memory bank.

David was younger than I, but one of those guys who could get me to do stuff that I shouldn't have done. There seemed to be a lot of younger friends and, yes, those my age, and yes, those older ones, too that could also get me to do things that I knew better than.

Homestead was a small, old 9-hole course in town near where David lived. Armed with a bottle opener and a package of straws, we walked onto the course late one weekend night and opened the cooler. We popped the caps off grape, orange, root beer, cokes, squirt and drank some from each. The cooler was horizonal rather than vertical which allowed us to take our time drinking in the sweet juice, rather than getting rush from a vertical cooler with bottles facing parallel. A later generation would call our concoction of various drinks suicides. We just thought we were pranking and getting away with something only we/he thought up. I'm glad we only did it once.

I'm sure there were a lot more things that we could have done to cause us to get into more trouble. I'm just glad neither of us was any more creative.

I don't have much of a yen or hankering for a bunch of different sodas or even slushes. But a good old Blue Eagle snow cone from the Snow Cone Lady in Summersville would hit the spot about now.