Kool-aid

Grape drink, or as I always called it, dinosaur slobbers. As a kid (I hate that phrase all of a sudden) my favorite type of Kool-aid was always grape flavored. Not because it stood out as being any better than the rest, but because it had a little purple dinosaur on the packet. It was a brachiosaur or a brontosaurus or something like that, one of the ones with a long neck. He was purple and he had green polka dots on his hide. He was smiling.

It’s funny that I remember all of that, I mean I don’t know if that dinosaur is still hanging around somewhere, or whether or not he’s still on the grape flavored Kool-aid packet. I don’t even know if Kool-aid is still available.

I know that Kool-aid style drink mixes are still hanging around. You can buy them in little packets with tubes to flavor a single bottle of water, or you can get the bigger packets that can make one or two quart jugs just like you did with the Kool-aid packets. Only now they come presweetened. You don’t have to add a small mountain of sugar to make it taste the way it should. Which is good and bad, but that’s a discussion I’ll leave for another day.

Now comes another thing that seems to have become a theme on Thursdays. I’m not talking about anything to do with the blog, but rather with Facebook and Twitter and all those lovely social media sites: Throwback Thursday.

The idea for Throwback Thursday must have spawned from two points. One, Throwback Thursday is alliteration making it fun to hear and fun to say. Two, somebody started uploading their old photos on Facebook on Thursday and it caught on as a trend.

Well, Throwback Thursday caught me at an odd point, as I have been feeling very nostalgic for one reason or another and the Kool-aid thing really brought that to mind.

I miss being a kid. I miss being a ten year old. Things were safe back then, figuratively speaking. I didn’t have to worry about any adult responsibilities. I could do whatever I wanted, be it Sound Effects on the platform or if I was going to stay inside and play Nintendo or Sega (I don’t remember which one I had at the time). The other big question, should I play with my Power Ranger toys or should I play with my Beast Wars Transformers toys. Those are questions I didn’t have answers to back then. And, that’s a lot different than it is now.

Do I pay this bill and not have money for groceries?

Can we afford to pay for internet and television?

Can I afford a mobile phone right now with all the debt piled up over my head?

Those are the questions I don’t have answers to nowadays, and I would trade all of that to go back to being that ten year old boy.

Maybe that’s where my safe place is. That warm earthy smelling platform, like it had just rained, the place where many stories were born, grew old, and died. It was there that I felt safe from everything.

I want to go back to that platform. Back to that year. I want to forget all my adult problems. Alas, things don’t work like that. So, I’ll keep dreaming, and I’ll keep writing, and maybe I’ll find that ten year old again, and he can tell me what it was really like.

Ryan

2-13-14

PS: I put Sound Effects in italics because that’s what I used to call it when I went out to the platform to make up my stories. I would pace across that rough concrete surface, and I would see these wonderful things all of them behind my eyes, and I would make the noises that went alongside the stories. Fighter jet sounds, guns, occasionally the sound of someone else’s voice talking. Something like that. And, that’s a deep enough scab. Lol. Maybe I’ll tell you more about it later. For now. It’s bed time.