From the age of five to seven I lived in the Panama Canal Zone with my mother, stepfather, and brother. At first mother stayed home and only Lucky (the stepfather) worked. Consequently our budget was slim and we enhanced our table with weekly trips into the jungle from which we returned with an entire stalk of bananas, and net bags full of mangos and papayas, and on two memorable occasions, six foot long green iguanas which Mother bravely dressed and cooked. I recall that it tasted like the finest white-meat chicken.
Most of our meals were heavy on carbohydrates, the cheapest of vittles that would fill growing bellies: Spanish rice, spaghetti, macaroni and cheese, split pea soup, pork and beans, and the like. Desserts and treats were scarce.
Mother disapproved of soda pop gluttony, but three or four times a year she managed to bring to the table a quart bottle of White Rock ginger ale. She made a ceremony of dividing this very evenly between our eight ounce glasses, which she had gathered in front of her, and then she announced that she had managed to purchase a second bottle. She cautioned that we must not demand more ginger ale, but be happy with what we had, and if we did that, then she would leave the other bottle out for the fairies overnight and they would transform it into a special drink that only fairies could make.
With such an incentive, my brother and I were as good as gold. The next evening the ceremony was repeated, the ginger ale bottle was brought out and the four glasses evenly filled. How eagerly I anticipated the first sip—what would it taste like? Oh, heavens—vanilla, sweet, delicious, creamy vanilla, with sparkling bubbles! It was so good I was convinced that no earthly power could have created it.
When we left Panama we seem to have left the fairies behind. I missed their soda for the next thirty years of my life, occasionally recalling that glorious flavor and wishing I had access to the same fairies as my Mother had had.
Then one day I was in a deli and sorting through the cold drinks in the fridge when I saw something calling itself Vanilla Cream Soda. Oh! You don’t suppose… Could it be possible? I have to try this! And there it was; the drink the fairies had made out of ginger ale.
It was a lovely flavor, but the cost was too high. I had to give up the soda pop fairies.