Reaping the Yield of a Past Age

In Vietnam, for many years - and maybe even now - there was a fair bit of money to be made from gathering and selling scrap from the U.S. war.  Scavenging military-legacy metals, to be reused for less daunting purposes, was a materially rewarding task.

In our house - or really in our garage - there's a similar discovery of new uses for old debris, involving the search for a commodity no longer used for its original purpose, but happily the original story is not civil war.  Back in ye olde days of yore - probably going back to about 2011 or so - I used to hoard Pepsi.  Being a true Scot, I would always wait until it was on a very particular sale:  $5 for two 12-packs, which comes out to less than 21 cents per can - something quite unthinkable in 2013.  And when the sale would reach that threshold, I would go out and buy nearly as much as could fit into a Corolla.  I remember telling people at church, "I am now the proud owner of over 500 cans of Pepsi."

Of course, the Pepsi would be lovingly stored - usually in the garage, but in the storage space during the year that we rented an old farmhouse with no garage.  Back then, the boys, like me, perceived Pepsi as something to drink.  I would discourage them, much like the chain-smoker who tells his kids in his raspy voice, "Don't you ever let me catch you smoking!"  Pepsi was officially contraband for everyone under 40 - and Amy wouldn't have breached Prohibition even if she had been younger.  But the boys would find it, open it, drink some, leave it outside in secret caches - opened or unopened.  The Farmhouse Year was the Golden Age of Pepsi retrieval and re-purposing.  I remember Amy was usually upset about it, and worried that the landlord would be upset if he found little blue cans lying all around the property.  The landlord was laid back, affable, and very busy running his apple orchard , raising a family and playing in his own rock band ("Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks"), and he was not worried about Pepsi cans.  But Amy would get very worked up about it. She'd tell me in her desperate-exasperation voice:  "You've got to get rid of that Pepsi!" and I'd tell her quite truthfully, "I am!"  Some of us take the long view of history, much the way that Mao told Nixon, when he asked his opinion, that it was too early (in 1973) to say whether the French Revolution was a success.

But then History changed.  I learned that researchers had discovered that the caramel coloring in Pepsi was carcinogenic.  In our family, you don't temp the fates on this one.  Since then, I've heard about other weird stuff in Pepsi's research laboratories that make me even more glad that I gave up the stuff.

But in my world, History often moves slowly.

Even though the Pepsi habit was officially over, the fallout of the Pepsi Years remains with us.  Being the hoarder that I am, Pepsi is strewn about the "landscape" of our house, and maybe the shed, and perhaps the cellar.  And now the Vietnamese parallel kicks in.  The boys have been "harvesting" abandoned "shrapnel" from the Pepsi Age, for their own use, as they do with so many other things.  But now the use itself has changed; they don't drink it either - which is a good thing, since the "youngest" cans on our property are now over two years old.  With Pepsi, like Twinkies, that might not be too meaningful a factor, but I'm still glad that they're not drinking it.

But they do have another purpose for it:  they function as de facto Molotov cocktails in the ongoing War On Driveway.  The boys triumphantly hurl the cans, watching them crash to the ground and spew their carcinogenic froth about the front yard.  When either of them finds one to detonate, it's a big deal.

And now the sport has become generalized.  Ian came back from church yesterday with a can of sugar-free Sprite.  I don't know where he got it, but he concluded that since it had passed its (drinking) date, it could be used for the higher purpose of projectile explosion. As long as it still has carbonation, and remains unopened, it's not nearly past its "expiration" date for the boys' purposes.

And Daniel took the concept to the next level.  He discovered another beverage and decided to explode it.  This drink, too, had passed its date. But unlike all that Pepsi, the drink happened to be beer, and the container happened to be a bottle.  In short order, I was picking up glass off the front lawn.  Today Daniel learned that bottles cannot be thrown for sport the way that cans can.

But there's one silver lining to the smashing hit of the day:  Ian reported to me that Daniel had broken a bottle of wine.  In other words, they don't know the difference between wine and beer, much the way that, for the longest time (and hopefully now, but maybe not) they didn't know the names of various tobacco products, and called cigarettes "cigars".

The Pepsi age ended years ago, and I' hoping that the remaining fallout has been fully harvested.  But if there are any remaining aluminum deposits on the property, I will certainly not be the first to know about them...

(September 15, 2013)