Suburban Goddess

While I was home, I was reminded of a time when I was younger. In the center of my tiny Mississippi hometown, there was a old country store. Every time we’d go to my grandmother’s house, my dad would stop at that store and get a Coke. It was a ritual for us; we’d both go in, he’d choose his Coke and I would find the most brightly-colored-sugar-soda I could find. I’d put the soda on the counter in front of Ms. TeeTee (I have no clue what her real name was), and she would tell me how big I was getting. But one day I discovered the magical and wonderous concoction known as a YooHoo. Sweet and chocolatey, it managed to emulate milk without ANY of the nutritional value. Every child’s dream.

So for weeks, my drink of choice became the YooHoo. YooHoos have a limited shelf-life; if you let it sit too long, all the psuedo-chocolate-flavoring would settle to the bottom. So before you opened it, you would have to shake it vigorously, a task that any eight-year-old would happily rise to. And so it became the new ritual; get the YooHoo out of the cooler, plop it in front of Ms. TeeTee to ring up, (“So big, so big!”) and commence to doing the YooHoo dance. Shake shake right, shake shake left, shake shake shake.

So one particular afternoon, my father was in a hurry. “What do you want, Sunshine?”

“YooHoo!” I replied from the cab of the truck. My mother sat next to me. A few moments later, my father came out of the store, YooHoo in hand. As he handed it to me, I wound up for the shake. Shake, shake, LEFT…. and realized that he had already shaken it for me. And taken the cap off. My mother’s brand new white shirt was now covered in brown YooHoo. I laughed so hard I snarfed, which did not make my mother any happier.

So on my last visit, I found myself sitting next to my mother with a Starbucks Frappiccino in hand. I started to laugh as I shook it.

“Hey Mom, heads up!”

“Not funny…”

This entry was posted on February 21, 2007 at 8:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.