Finding 35

10. Pop Shoppe Pop

Once you get a bike, you really get to experience some freedom.  Especially if it is a three speed!  I remember my first real bike.  I must have been in grade three or four.  Now this was a bike that was built to last!  It weighed a ton!  That is perfect for a kid.  I bike that builds leg muscles!  It must have been built so sturdy because of the wide tires and the three speeds.  It took a fair bit of strength and leverage to get the lower gear going.  You stand up on the pedals and use the leverage of your body to push down on the pedals whilst pulling up of the handlebars so you can use all of your body weight!  And with each rotation of the pedals I would gain a little more momentum.

Living on the top of the big hill, it made it very quick to get to anywhere, as everything was down hill from where we lived.  And going downhill, it’s amazing there weren’t more accidents, or for that matter a single accident!  We never wore bike helmets and we never seemed to crash.  I’m sure it happened at some point, but I never had an accident, other than that one time near Chris Hayes house, when my brakes failed or something and I went over the curb… no big whoop.  Just embarrassing.

So after a few years, when I no longer went to Mrs. Casey’s’ house for daycare, my sister Elizabeth, who was (and still is) 4 ½ years older than me, would take care of me at lunch and after school.  We had all sorts of fun!  Elizabeth was three grades ahead of me (she had to repeat grade 4 because she was memorizing all the words and not learning them).  As it turns out, she was dyslexic, and no one caught on ‘til grade 4.

Anyway, back then, my parents would leave for work at about 8:10 am, and Mary Angela, my other sister, was off to school at the same time.  So Elizabeth and I would get ready for school, then get lunch ready.  Sometimes we would make a Kraft Pizza!  We had everything we need to make an awesome pizza, almost!  Elizabeth would make the dough and grate the cheese and I would cut the salami (at least, I think I did), but my big role was to rush home at lunchtime and make a quick bike ride to the gas station at the bottom of the street, as Elizabeth made the pizza and got it in the oven.

In the morning, once my parents left, I would look around for a few empty glass pop bottles and load them up in my backpack to return for the deposit.  Pop was sold in 1-litre glass bottles and you paid a 35-cent deposit on the bottle, back then plastic pop bottles didn’t exist.  We would look for some change in my dad’s suit pockets or overcoat.  He always had loose change in his pockets; he even had a big coin dish on his dresser that we would all raid every now and then.  The real trick was to take a few quarters, but make it look like you didn’t take any quarters.  The secret was to place the nickels and a dime in such a fashion as to look like they fell randomly and a quarter was always left on top. There were no dollar coins back then.  Usually, I would take 40 cents, combined with the three empties, I had enough to buy a bottle of coke for Elizabeth and I to share with our pizza over lunch while watching Scooby Do, Gilligan’s Island or Hogan’s Hero’s.  And since our house was right behind the school, it only took me 15 seconds to get home and get on my way to the store at the bottom of the hill.

Now, getting back up the hill was a different story.  With the new bottle of Coke in my backpack, not to be confused with New Coke that happened a few years later, I began the sprint home.  I could sprint part of the way, the flat part at the bottom of our street was the easy part.  That’s where I would start gaining my momentum on my three-speed.  Sometimes, I saw kids still walking to their homes for lunch as I was making my way back home, with a cold bottle of pop on my back.  I was able to make it up about 2/3’s of the way up that hill.  It was steep!  Then the tiredness kicked in, and would then begin the process of slaloming back and forth across the street, slowly swooping to the top.  I would count the number of lampposts to the top, 4 more!  3 more!  2 more, ok, almost there!  And then with some sort of burst of energy I would zip by the last bit, up the driveway, kick open the gate with my foot as I passed into the backyard, over the grass, down a small little bank and hop off the bike and land on the back doorstep with the finesse of a superhero making their descent into the secret cave.

By the time I was coming upstairs, the pizza would be coming out of the oven.  Pop would be poured, and into the basement we would go.  The pepperoni was still really hot, and the ice-cold coke cooled down my often-burnt tongue.  Most times, we would drink a little more than half the pop, and put the rest in the fridge for after school.  And usually by the time our mom got home, it was all gone.  I think we told our parents about this one Christmas when we were teenagers, and they got a laugh.  They probably knew, but as a kid, you think your parents never know anything.