Thom writes:Each week, I post three words. You write something using the words.
Then come back and post a link to the contribution with Mr. Linky (but please, link to the exact post, not your blog, by clicking on the exact post title and paste it to Mr. Linky below). As always, there's no hard-and-fast rule that you have to post on Wednesday.
To link up with this week's Three Word Wednesday *Click Here*
This week's words:
Brisk; Detached; Miserable
Childhood Memory
You called me brisk tea
like an ad from the forties.
Oh I was young then,
stealing the neighbor's
mail, hoping but so detached
about it all. No
matter. Was her hair
bleach and mom miserable
having to give it
back.
October 10, 2012 6:32 AM
Image found on the internet, is not me :D
Oh, the fun we had as kids; but it wasn't stealing - just exciting re-distribution!
ReplyDeleteUmm... actually I was a pretty good thief by the time I was twelve, stealing stuff to read out of drug stores because I had finished the library off for the science fiction I liked and having no money...
Deletebrisk tea could be the only two words needed in this poem..i am swilling it around savouring the flavour the possibilities..maybe the after taste..the bits that stick..and the ones that wash away..jae
ReplyDeleteConnecting brisk and tea is a long time corporate trademark of Lipton Co. It was made into a product line as well of tea drink in a can a while ago named Brisk. Your remark signals how remarkable that corporate decision was many years ago. I don't actually think it goes back to the forties though. I think I am anachronistic in that way.
DeleteEnjoyed your piece far more than Lipton tea.
ReplyDeleteMy husband worked shifts at a Lipton manufacturing plant, when he was in college. That was the first time I heard about "acceptable percentages of insects and rodent pellets". Probably it was no different at other plants, but it dimmed my enthusiasm for Lipton for a life time1
I still have a cubicle at the Nabisco (Kraft) bakery in Portland where I sit when I work. The acceptable levels you write of are certainly there in the bakery too. Also true is a genuine attempt to avoid cross contamination with allergens and protecting the food against contamination with foreign biological or any other matter. So I take a different tack and point out from direct experience that most kitchens in homes are far more vulnerable to contamination than industrial food processing plants are these days. This is due to good habits built into the process with checks and enforcement there. In fact, in the bakery it's now overkill because as a subsidiary of Kraft, Nabisco as a baking company is now under dairy product rules which are necessarily much more strict.
DeleteThe other side though, so many of our plants produce the kind of fast food that we mostly agree is part of the nutrition problem.
LOL funny story.
ReplyDeleteProbably not funny to the woman whose lightener it was. Remember, this was the forties and such things were kept pretty much a secret. I distinctly remember my mom's amusement over the situation, even though it must have been mortifying to her to have to confess her kid's misbehavior. I am sure I wanted the package which came in the mail to be my present. I did open it beyond repairing the packaging. It was in a plain brown wrapper. I did get in trouble. We lived in a house that was college housing during the WWII housing shortage and it was split as so many single homes were in those days into apartments. The other lady lived there too. I was three.
DeleteThere were plenty of girls that used domestic cleaners to do their bleaching in those days. Cheaper but disasters did occur. You were clearly envious of the parcel not the content!
ReplyDeleteI am quite sure this was not domestic cleaners. In a bright green bottle there was some stuff probably off white that kind of glowed. It was thick and you could see flow lines. I recall taking it to Mom and asking what it was. I didn't know I was doing anything unfortunate. :D I think Mom's first response was more along the lines of a giggle before she got stern with me.
DeleteOh the things children get up to! And the embarrassment they cause their parents. I love the image of the brisk tea. :)
Delete