Just finished eating a banana popsicle in honor of the one banana popsicle I had as a child. It wasn’t the same and I don’t think the cause is solely the intervening years and faulty memory.
When I was little and the ice cream man came around in Richland, I’d a friend who loved banana popsicles and I distinctly remember the smell of them. And I remember eating one once. A double popsicle. And it wasn’t bad. In fact, it was kind of nice.
So we have this box of Rainbox popsicles because I wanted fruit juice popsicles for H.o.p. and these were the only popsicles they turned out to have. The flavors are sour apple, strawberry that’s so sour it ceases to taste much like strawberry, banana and bubblegum. What fruit is bubblegum I don’t know but those are the only popsicles that H.o.p. will eat of this box as he says the apple and strawberry are nasty. The strawberry and the sour apple flavors are pretty unpleasant, real jazzed up; I may love tartly-flavored fruit candies but it doesn’t work so well with popsicles.
I smelled the banana popsicle and it didn’t smell, but I’ve been stopped up all day too. I remembered banana popsicles smelling of ripe bananas. I asked H.o.p. what it smelled like. He could smell something I couldn’t and said, “Yuck!” I said what did it smell like and he couldn’t identify it. H.o.p. loves bananas. Obviously, this didn’t smell like bananas to him.
It half-way tasted like bananas, mellower in spirit than the other flavors, but in some ways didn’t taste like a banana at all. It certainly didn’t taste anything like that banana popsicle I remember from my youth, nor did it have at all the same texture. Of course, some of the experience of that banana popsicle was not just the popsicle but the freezer of the ice cream man’s truck, the dry but egg-frying heat of the desert and perhaps the aroma of DDT, because seems that the ice cream man had a way of appearing in close proximity of the DDT guys fogging for mosquitos. Maybe because of the way we kids hopped on our bikes to follow the sweet DDT smoke. Which means the ice cream man didn’t always appear in the hot hot of the day as the DDT trucks went around in the early evening.
Yeah, bright, chasing after DDT. But we had no idea it could be dangerous.
These popsicles always leave me feeling thirsty, whereas the sweeter popsicles from when I was a youth appeased thirst better and were solid and cold enough one had to lick at them a little while befoore feeling the inclination to bite into them.
I followed the banana popsicle up with a strawberry and I’m full but thirsty which is kind of unpleasant. For a long while after the tastebuds feel like they’ve been scoured with a sour loofah in way that begs you wanting to relieve the sensation with something really wet but nothing is so sweet and wet to get rid of the feeling. The only thing that wet is a big glass of just plain old ice water taken in lieu of the popsicle.
It’s good to occaionally eat some of these popsicles though. It reminds me of what H.o.p. might be feeling when he has a popsicle and then begs for another, then eats another and immediately wants another. He loves the popsicles but they never quite satisfy him either. They don’t fullfill. They just make you want more popsicle because you’re now thirstier and something in the popsicle makes you feel like if you just had another then it would do the trick. But it doesn’t.
Update: H.o.p. says he always just wants more popsicles because they taste terrific.
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