By Joe Broadmeadow
Somewhere between then and now, without a press release or a moment of silence, the two-stick root beer popsicle disappeared.
Nobody investigated. No one filed a report. The thing simply stopped being on the shelf, and then it stopped being in the freezer chest at the corner store, and then it stopped being anywhere at all. If you go looking today you will find single-stick pops in colors that do not occur in nature, and you will find something called a root beer float bar, and you will not find what you are looking for.
What you are looking for is a flat brown slab in a paper sleeve with two wooden sticks running up through the middle of it like a set of rails.
The design assumed something about you. That is the part worth noticing. Whoever drew it up in some factory office understood that a kid does not arrive alone. A kid arrives with a brother, or with the kid from two houses down, or with whoever happened to be standing on the same patch of hot sidewalk when the money got counted. The product was built around the premise that there would be two of you, and that one popsicle would have to answer for both.
It cost a nickel. Then a dime. The price is not the point. The point is that a nickel bought a transaction between two people, not one.
Splitting it was a skill, and like most skills nobody teaches you, you learned it by doing it badly. You held it flat, one stick in each fist, and you pulled and twisted at the same time. If the pop was too cold it would not give at all, and you would stand there straining at it like a man trying to open a paint can with his thumbs. If it had been out in the sun for even a minute past its tolerance, the whole thing sheared into slush and dropped on the pavement, and you both stood over the wreckage and said nothing, because there was nothing to say.
When it worked, it never worked evenly. One half always came away thick and one half came away thin, and both of you saw it in the same instant. That was the negotiation. Sometimes it went to whoever paid. Sometimes it went to whoever was bigger. Sometimes, and these are the times I remember, the kid holding the fat half handed it over without being asked, and neither of you ever mentioned it again for the rest of your lives.
Root beer was the right flavor for this. Cherry stained your mouth and told on you. Orange was fine, grape was medicine. Root beer tasted like something adults drank, which made you feel promoted. It went sweet and then it went slightly bitter at the back, the sassafras doing whatever sassafras does, and it left you with a taste that lasted long enough to walk home on.
The last inch was the hazard. The pop softened around the wood and slid, and you had to take it in one motion or lose it. Then you had a bare stick, damp and splintery, tasting faintly of pencil, and you chewed on it for a while because that was what you did. Somebody usually got a splinter in a lip. Nobody’s mother ever heard about it.
I do not think anyone decided to kill it. That would require malice, and this was only arithmetic. Two sticks cost more than one. The split is a defect on a spec sheet, a failure mode, a customer complaint waiting to happen. The market moved toward the single serving because the single serving is cleaner and it sells two units where the old way sold one. Everything in that decision is correct and nothing in it is wrong, and it still took something away.
What it took was the assumption. Not the popsicle. The assumption underneath it, that you would be sharing, that the thing in your hand belonged half to somebody standing next to you, that the fair division of an unfair object was an ordinary problem a seven-year-old was expected to solve on a sidewalk in July without an adult present.
I could not tell you the name of every kid I split one with. That is the honest part, and it is the part that stings. Some of them I could find in an obituary if I went looking, and I have gone looking, and I have found them. Cumberland is not a large place and the years are not kind in an evenly distributed way.
The two-stick pop was a small piece of engineering that took it as given that you were not by yourself. It went away quietly and the world it belonged to went with it, and I have no argument to make about that, no policy to propose, no evidence to submit.
Only this: it was better when there were two sticks.
Leave a Reply