An old love reappears for a moment

I haven’t been much of a coke drinker for many years now.  I grew out of it sometime in my twenties, and never went back.  I drank coffee, and tea, and various kinds of booze, but cokes just got left out.  I didn’t care for them any more.

Except for one, and I couldn’t get it.

My mystical Holy Grail of soft drinks was Delaware Punch, a drink based mostly on grape flavor with a little wild cherry, which was remarkable for being “still,“ or uncarbonated.  Chugging a Delaware Punch would not help you burp the alphabet or the National Anthem or anything else.  It was a Texas-based drink, first made up in San Antonio in 1913, and was always a regional item (nothing about it had anything to do with Delaware).  When I was young, I helped my grandmother put tax stamps on cigarette packages—my grandfather was a jobbing tobacco wholesaler, and one of the very last in Texas to apply the tax stamps to each package by hand— and sometimes she would let me run to the general store at the end of the block (yes, Comanche still had a general store on the courthouse square in those days) and bring us both back a soda.  I’d always look for myself a Delaware Punch in the cooler box (they had one of them, too; the bottles stood up to their necks in circulating refrigerated water to keep them cold).  If they were out I might get a chocolate Nehi or a Dr Pepper instead, but if a Delaware Punch was there I’d get it.

And sometime in the years when I wasn’t drinking soda waters any more, Delaware Punch went away.  It never showed up in vending machines or convenience stores or supermarkets, and when I thought to wonder about it again, I decided it must have been yet another casualty of the soda wars.  So I was pleasantly surprised when I found that the blood bank was offering donors Delaware Punch in the canteen, along with the cookies and crackers and orange juice and coffee.  I had heard rumors that the only place left to buy Delaware Punch was in Mexico, but the blood bank seemed to have found a source for the syrup concentrate, at least, so again I would make a point of asking for it every time I went in to donate.

Then tonight L, M and I were over at Central Market picking up a few staples (bread, tortillas, coffee), when . . . suddenly we walked up on a pallet of Delaware Punch in six-pack cans!  Now it isn’t that surprising that Central Market sometimes brings in hard-to-find soft drinks; I’ve previously seen Dublin Dr Pepper available as an import (from Erath County, all of 150 miles).  However, to find them offering a drink that I thought was “really, most sincerely dead” was too much temptation to resist.  I brought a six-pack home.  The information on the side of the can says that the bottler (boy, what a misnomer) has plants in Alamogordo or Nacogdoches, so I expect they must have got it from the Nacogdoches plant (250 miles’ importation, all the way from Nacogdoches County).  Of course, the can gives a bit of its own taste to the drink (there’s no avoiding that, I suppose), but to have a taste of forty years ago at home was sure nice.  Maybe Central Market will restock them ever’ so often, so I can enjoy that trip back again.

My seahorse redirects a leaf-lined toenail cutter.  Fnord.