Peanuts and Pepsi

The plastic seat covers made that crinkly sound like a thousand pieces of Saran Wrap crunching together at the same time. Little square indentations on my legs reminded me that I had sat on the car seat far too long and I needed a break. Hot blasting air assaulted my face and rampaged my hair, flipping it around and stinging my cheeks. Oklahoma in summer time, red dirt, hot air, fast wind and flat land. The asphalt roads traced their checkerboard patterns across the waving wheat field landscape; we were on our way to grandma’s house.

The gas station attendant nodded his head and handed me the ladies paddle shaped key ring, dad stood in front of the water cooler as he pulled out three Pepsi bottles. I knew his next steps would take him to the peanut bags on the counter by the attendant. I knew we would be there a few more minutes than my mom would prefer. Dad had his, “I’m going to strike up a conversation with this nice young man,” look on his face. Dad could talk a stuck fly off of the fly paper prison on the wall. Dad could sew a yarn and tell a tale and dad knew people.

When I returned with the funny shaped key ring, dad was engrossed in an animated conversation about some such thing that I could never remember after our trip. But he and the attendant had shared a sacred moment in time – person to person, face to face, and human being to human being. It never surprised me when dad would invariably be able to connect one unknown person to some person or place he knew through out his life’s experience – like I said – dad knew people. He knew how to talk fish to fishermen, logs to loggers and shoes to potential shoe buyers. Dad was a salesman.

We both made the blustery trek back to the parked car, and heard the familiar, “J.L., what took you so long?” She knew, but she asked the question anyway. It was the opening line of the beginning saga of the gas stop encounter story dad would tell us for the remaining miles of the trip as we drank the soda pop and chomped on peanuts. Dad would put his peanuts inside his Pepsi bottle so he had one hand free to drive. His other hand would grasp the Pepsi bottle and as his story would unfold with the Pepsi bottle becoming like a baton a conductor holds, pausing and waving emphatically just at the right moments in the musical composition of his unfolding story.

“Well,” he would answer, “You know that young man in there knew old Larson that lives on Chestnut street. Larson used to drive his school bus, we had a great talk about Larson, it reminded me of…” and dad would continue his monologue entering the new information he learned from his new found friend at the gas station. We would laugh, sigh, and I would sit on those silly square shaped plastic car seat covers and never even notice I was uncomfortable because dad was spinning his yarn, creating life in the fast moving vehicle.

We were on our way to grandma’s house, eating peanuts, drinking Pepsi, and listening to dad’s real life adventure. Life just didn’t get much better than that!

cStacey Britton 23.12.2004 (story dated back to the early 1970’s and the names of Larson…were not original names)