Almost as Good as a Coke

Some times, moments, events set a memory. Saturday morning, November 23, 1963, breakfast at home in Yokohama, phone rings. Bev Hatchett, a neighbor, calling to say President Kennedy has been shot.

Playing in a neighbor's backyard the afternoon April 12, 1945, news shouted out a back window: President Roosevelt has died.

Four months later, August 1945, playing outside at my Gentry grandparents’ in Pensacola when nutty Mrs. Smith next door, a German who as part of interminable fights with poor Mr. Smith would run outside slamming the back door and scream at the top of her voice “heil Hitler! heil Hitler! heil Hitler!” now shouting to the neighborhood “the Japs have surrendered.”

Don’t recall the date, but that morning in the 1940s when for the first time, milk bottles on our front porch said “homogenized.” Bit odd, new taste, richer and thicker, less natural. Not queasy but edgy about it, I don’t like milk taste to change. Take no chances with off milk and won’t even sniff milk past the expiration date, much less taste.

St. Andrews Bay Dairy delivered pasteurized milk to our front steps every morning; but raw milk to Mom and Pop’s house and my mother forbade us drinking it. Tuberculosis, she said. Or undulant fever like Asbury in Flannery O’Connor’s “The Enduring Chill.” For years, daily milk delivery, which may have changed to every other day during WW2, was in proper glass quart bottles, on top, a heavy duty paper lid with a tab for pulling it off. You rinsed out your milk bottles

when empty and put them on the front step the night before. Dawn the next morning milk was delivered just as Howie Newsome in Our Town but instead of horse drawn, a small motorvan clanking around Massalina Drive, a white milk truck with a a huge red circle painted on each side and the same circling letters St. Andrews Bay Dairy that were printed on the bottle cap.

Always this kind of bottle, long neck, cardboard lid down in the top rim, cream risen to the top and poured off by my mother for my parents’ coffee.

Then, shudder, homogenized. First a choice: raw, pasteurized, homogenized. Soon, no choice. Homogenized.

To mind because of the strange new milk bottle Linda brought home from Publix. Heavyduty plastic. Somewhat resembles a glass milkbottle of old.

What? Skeptical. Fairlife milk. Twice the price. More protein, less fat, less sugar. To taste or not to taste? Risky. Can’t be worse than almond milk, coconut milk, soy milk. Tasted. Not bad. Different feel, thicker on the tongue, richer. Comes to mind a TV line: "it's almost as good as a rolladex" as a guy in the alley around the streetcorner opens his coat to show a display of wristwatches. Doesn’t say so on the bottle, but a Coca-Cola product.

Why do they keep changing milk? Twice already in my lifetime.