Pre Pressing Pew Pewing

It was family lore and I heard this story from my parents one day.  The situation occurred when I was just a new born, which would have made my sister about two and a half to three years old.  According to my parents my sister began to say the phrase "Pre pressing pew pewing," and would say it several times very animatedly.  They said it was as if she wanted something but they could not figure out what it was.  "Pre pressing pew pewing!" she would emphatically persist, but they were clueless as to what she meant.  This went on for a couple of weeks until they were driving somewhere and all of us were in the car.  As they drove past a billboard my sister began to scream out "Pre Pressing Pew Pewing!" and point to the sign.  It was a Coca Cola ad and the slogan was "Refreshing New Feeling."

Now some people have a family crest to be proud of and others can trace their family history back through many generations.  My family didn't have anything so lofty or noble.  As it turns out I was born into a family of Coca Cola drinkers and what we had was loyalty to that drink.  If there was some sort of family crest for us it would have been red and white and written in the Coca Cola script.  It could also be said our appreciation of Coke had been handed down from my parent's parents.  They were Coke drinkers as well.  Now don't get me wrong, it wasn't forbidden for us to have other flavors of soft drinks when we wanted them, but if it was going to be a cola then it had to be a Coke - nothing else would do.  When we went to my maternal grandmother's house we could chose from either Coke or Sprite.  When we went to my paternal grandparent's house it was just Coke, but it was even more special because they bought the little glass bottles.

Oh how I loved to visit my grandmother and have one of those glass bottles of Coke.  They kept them next to the water heater and they came in a container that held twelve bottles.  Very rarely, but sometimes there would be a cold Coke waiting in the refrigerator, but usually we had to get some ice.  This was always a challenge because my grandparents had one of those devilish ice cube trays with a metal divider insert.  In order to free the ice you had to crank up this metal hinge in the middle.  It was a finger pincer for sure.  If we were going to be there for a while I would put another bottle in the refrigerator to chill for later.  The unbreakable family rule was that we always had to wait until after the noon hour before we could have a Coke.  Many was the time I would be counting the minutes until the hands of the clock pointed straight up.  As an adult I am not sure why that noon rule was enacted.  No caffeine was allowed to us children in the morning.  Did they think it would somehow make us more awake than we should be? We also could not have a caffeinated drink after 6 pm, which made more sense as a rule.  As children though we felt this left us a narrow window of Coke drinking time so we drank as many as we were allowed in that span.

Coke actually influenced us in several ways.  I can remember how my family would chose one fast food restaurant over another based specifically on whether they had Coke on tap.  We were actually very anti Pepsi and would never accept it as a substitute for the 'real thing'.

I continued my Coke drinking ways into my adulthood.  By that time I had also amassed a collection of Coke memorabilia.  I have in my collection a wooden Coke tray that used to hold glass bottles, a Coke piggy band, whistle and several Coke glasses.  When the 'cola wars' commercials started in the 80s my family and I swore that we would be able to tell the difference.

We stayed true to Coke, but they didn't stay true to us.  I felt personally betrayed when they changed the formula in 1985 and refused to even try the 'New Coke'.  Thank God they cracked under the backlash and brought the old formula back again.  However, it was never the same.  The 'Classic Coke' as they now termed it had been changed. The alteration was the type of sweetener used.  High fructose corn syrup has a much different taste than cane sugar.  It no longer gave me that 'Refreshing New Feeling'.

Oh, yes, I still drank it, but much less often.  I didn't try any other types of colas either.  Strangely enough I think I went into some sort of mourning.  Gone was my childhood treat and it wasn't coming back again. I eventually gave up all kinds of carbonated beverages and drank only water.  I know that soft drinks of all types have fallen out of favor.  A crusade of sorts has been after the soft drink industry and the leaders of this crusade will tell you all sorts of things about how each 12 oz soft drink has 10 teaspoons of sugar and how Coke in particular has so much acid it will dissolve a nail.  Yeah, yeah, yeah - that may be so, but I didn't give it up for those reasons and I never gave up that longing for what I had tasted in my childhood.

Then something remarkable happened.  When I first heard about it I couldn't believe it.  It was my husband who mentioned it in passing.  He heard that in Mexico they still used the original formula of Coke with sugar.  I didn't believe it at first, but I decided to track it down.  Sure enough I found this was true.  It was not however in my local grocery store.  Then one day while I was in a convenience store I saw it.  I wish I could say there was some sort of angelic white light illuminating the scene, but it was just the overhead florescent lights.  There it was right in front of me and in a glass bottle as well.  A Mexican Coke. 

I took it from the refrigerated cooler and the bottle felt perfectly chilled.  I purchased it and the store cashier opened it for me - it even had the proper type of cap - no wimpy twist off.  I paused just a second before I took my first swallow.  Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!  It was like opening a door back into my childhood.  There was the taste.  There was the perfect carbonation.  There was the experience in soda drinking that had been missing in my life.

Ah, what joy.  It was a Refreshing Old Feeling.