21. Vess

Most grocery stores have their off-brand "private brand" soda. Most of them are pretty bad knock offs of the originals. I remember when I worked at Wal*Mart down in Houston, Sam's Cola and its cousins were a quarter a can in the coke machines outside the store--which kept the prices down on the brand name sodas but never tempted me enough to drink them. Actually, I did--I drank the lemon lime whatever it was. But most knock offs just aren't quite right.

I grew up with Vess and I didn't realize it was one of those kinds of brands, sort of a second-tier soda, until I didn't live here and couldn't find it in the stores. As a family, we didn't buy soda when I was little, but anytime we went up to Jack & Joe's house (my dad's aunt Jackie and her husband Joe), I drank Vess strawberry soda. They had a fridge in the basement that was all soda and beer: Vess was the soda, and Pabst was the beer.

Later I grew to love "Just Whistle" which was Vess' orange soda. I didn't realize cream soda was a brownish clear liquid in some parts of the country until I was in college; I thought it was supposed to be an artificial red color like Vess' version (I think this is a northern-southern distinction, actually, as I remember cream soda down in Georgia was red, too).

I don't drink a lot of soda anymore--probably have had two sodas this year. I drink a lot of coffee these days and I try not to ingest too much sugar. But sometimes I think about playing Life or Monopoly down in Jackie and Joe's basement with my cousin and my brother, at that old table that had been my great-grandmother's. I think about that sharp carbonated taste with the ultra-sweet fake strawberry or grape flavor, and I miss it.