GOOD MORNING, FRIENDS

A REMEMBERAMBLE OCTOBER 06, 2025

I welcome you to my Monday, you may feel free to consider it yours. I'm generous like that, I will give you days when I can, but not my last one. I made a list of several unrelated topics to throw at you this morning, so it will be eclectic, didactic, dissertated, non-automotive, discombobulation-free, non-diabetic, and very inexpensive as usual. I will begin with a topic near and dear to my heart, from boyhood, and that was Granny's quilts. Granny had family members in WWII, and later in most branches of the service.

She was given those wool Army blankets, and used them for the innards of her quilts. A quilt with a wool blanket inside was magnificent. Okay, now, new topic, St. Joseph's orange flavored baby aspirin. We loved them. They were almost as good as orange flavored Aspergum, which we loved also. Someone should make and market aspirin-free baby aspirin, and aspirin-free Aspergum. I'd buy it. Speaking of things of yore that tasted good, reminds me of things of yore that it didn't.

One thing stands out as the absolute worst "candy" in the world. It was kid's candy, a gel in a tube, supposed to be grape flavored, just like our astronauts ate. Ain't a astronaut nor even a cosmonaut that would eat that mess. Laika, bless her heart would not have eaten it, poor Laika, damn them sorry Soviets. I betcha not any astronauts ever ate that horrible goo in a tube for kids. As I said it was supposedly, according to the tube, grape in flavor. It was horrible, it numbed your tongue.

I had a suspicion that some employee at the Anbesol factory was using the ingredients and the "sheenry," to bootleg astronaut style candy, after the office folks left for the day at five. It was of course not pure Anbesol, it had some tones of that kerosene flavored cough syrup, and perhaps, a slight road pavement note could be detected. Me and my cousin Morris Brantley bought some. After squirting it onto our tongues, a disgusted shiver wracked our bones, it caused me to drop my tube in the dirt.

Then a danged if a cat didn't run over and bury it, in a few seconds several other cats showed up, to see if the first one was okay and to find out if they needed to help bury it. . They didn't even have a cat, it brought out of county cats, way out of their jurisdictions. As Dave Chapelle would say, "that's just foul man, just FOUL!" Oh, now here is another topic, my great-uncle Loddy Romeo Peebles had kidney stones often, and an old doctor told him to get in a rocking chair and rock vigorously for a while, the rocking would slosh them around and he would pass them.

It worked well for him every time. Have any of you ever heard that? Here is another one, chicken flavored crackers. I am referring to those Chicken in a Biscuit crackers. First of all, in the United Kingdom, they call crackers biscuits, so that is where the biscuit part comes from. I can imagine that in 1963, Nabisco is having a meeting with all three hundred of their vice presidents, brainstorming new product ideas. I imagine a junior vice president of something or another suggested that maybe start making the animal crackers actually taste like the animal it was shaped to represent.

Every eye in the room had to be upon him, and I am sure it got the biggest laugh of the day. But, he was the grand-nephew of the vice president of shortening acquisitions, and he was a cracker jack acquirer of shortening and he never told any one his secrets to acquiring so much shortening at such low prices. So, they all laughed heartily, and when it died down, the grand-uncle looked over at his dunce of a nephew, (by marriage, of course, but he did not want Doris to find out the boy's idea was laughed at.

He would never hear the end of it) and said quietly, "well, maybe we could start with chicken flavored crackers, we all like chicken." His uncle was pleased with his diplomatic efforts to diffuse what could have been a bad situation for his domestic life. But then, the boy asked, "okay, but what kind of chicken, and white meat or dark?" Bless his heart. If you have fond memories of chenille bedspreads, oil cloth covered kitchen tables, with well worn, brittle, and cracked linoleum underneath, raise your hand.

I had one other topic on my list but we will save it for later, it was Dodge's 1978 and 1979 Li'l Red Express Trucks. Okay, later you all. We love

ya.

NUMBERS 6: 24-26 KJV

we boyz three, babee conway, lil merle, & me