I think I can pin it down to my birthday in 1994, the morning after I got the call to let me know Vanderbilt was offering me their most prestigious graduate fellowship for grad school. My then-girlfriend joined me in ditching class and driving up to Nashville, where I promptly ram-raided the bookstore for all manner of hats and t-shirts and car stickers and assorted swag. And then we decamped to the Sucker District, where I had my first visit to the Old Spaghetti Factory and my very first encounter with the Italian Cream Soda. Club soda, raspberry Torani, splash of whipped cream on top. And for whatever reason, I was immediately captivated.
And the good thing was, in the early 90s, the emergence of second-wave coffee sellers in the South meant that an Italian soda was as close as Barnie’s Coffee and Tea, or any number of other spots. It was probably less sugary than Dr Pepper, which was my principal carbonated vice from 1986 til then, but it also had something else going for it – mostly based on timing. It was spring, and I was young, and the prospect of Vanderbilt was like a country record played backward. I was going to get a fresh start, I was going to get to leave Alabama, I was going to finally get to do what I’d always wanted to do: study politics to the exclusion of general-education requirements and ancillary electives, with a bunch of people equally devoted to the topic and focused on the classroom instead of fraternity rush and sorority meetings. And along the way, I’d get to take in actual SEC athletics and swipe my ID in Coke machines to pay for drinks and learn a new set of TV and radio stations.
It was a new start, and of all my new starts, it was the only one where I was happy to push the past down the black hole behind me never to be seen again. And a delightful new beverage was the perfect synecdoche for making myself over into a new person. And if only I’d had the presence of mind and lack of responsibility to cut one more tie along the way, things might have turned out very very different indeed. Or maybe not. Irrespective of my poor relationship choices, I was going to grad school to launder the choices I made in undergrad, which is the last reason to go to grad school. So there’s no lead pipe cinch I would have made it out alive anyway even without a bad girlfriend anchoring me down.
But it was spring, and my car was less than a year old, and the dashed dreams of four years earlier had been successfully unearthed and brought back to life. And I could relax on some notional veranda of the mind with my raspberry Italian soda and gaze across the horizon of a glorious future unfolding. And to be honest, that might have been the last time in my life where spring meant something other than “pollen and heat are coming.”