Blowing Bubbles

“Bubbles and Illusions are beautiful, even if they’re empty inside.” Alfred E. Newman

Once upon a time, before age edged out our innocence, we blew bubbles and chased them. Harmless fun—life was good. That was then, this is now.

Last week I stopped by Tommy’s drug store for pills. I’m a regular. He eats out more and his golf game has improved, thanks to addicts like me who’re chemically dependent for survival.

Tommy’s store has a retro feel, a 1950’s throwback. It’s like the old days of town square drug stores. You could buy good stuff then…comic books, magazines, Old Spice, Hadicol, Lydia E. Pinkham, butch wax, mustard plasters and a little hardware. Female hygiene items and contraceptives you had to ask for. The added bonuses of gossip, home-remedies and fishing tales were free.

In my town, Colquitt, GA, population 1,939 souls, we had Cook’s-U-Save-It. The outside sign read Sundries and More. The ‘more’ were pretty decent vanilla and cherry cokes, milk shakes and ice cream sundaes topped with cherries. For a quarter you could get a good after-school fix. You could survive ‘til mama put the country fried steak on the table.

It had a soda fountain counter. Solid black, ringed with chrome. Stools were bolted to the thin-slat heart pine floors. The floors creaked when you walked on them. The wood was waxed to a glossy sheen. Relics of these drug stores still survive the invasion of CVS. They eke out an existence in the tired, dying towns of the South.

Anyway, on a shelf sits a bottle of Super Imperial Miracle Bubbles. The name seems a bit ostentatious for a cheap concoction of soap and water. It cost $2.98. My dogs are bored. I figure a few bubbles will liven things up. So I buy it.

I pull out the plastic dipper and blow super imperial miracle bubbles. Mac and Sophie are 9 and 11, that’s 63 and 77 in dog years. Some of you can relate. It’s like a T-shot elixir. Arthritis and lethargy, poof, gone. They’re born-again pups. They go ballistic, chasing and attacking the bubbles, baffled when they burst. They want more. Such are all who chase bubbles. America is a bubble-breeding machine, and Americans are amusement junkies.

I remember the cooped-up, rainy-day boredom of youth. Seconds before my bare fists pound my brother into pulp, mama would pull out the bubble blend. It replaced the sniveling and whining of siblings and saved my brother’s life more than once. It kept us busy ‘til supper. Excitement soon evaporates. Boredom is the bane of life. Thank God for mama’s meatloaf.

Age moves on. We left soap and water bubbles and moved into Bazooka and baseball card bubble gum. Bazooka came wrapped in comic strips and looked like pink chews from Tootsie Rolls. You had to chew the sugar out of it first. If chewed too long you’d get lock jaw. But then, oh, the bubbles. Big lungs were beneficial, and bulbous lips didn’t hurt. Two girls in my class had both in abundance. For some reason they were quite popular.

One of my cousins lived behind me. In Colquitt, everybody’s kin. At family reunions, the entire town showed up. His name was Hieronymus. We called him Junior. Who’d stick a kid with such a name? He’d be a natural-born loser from birth. But not Junior.

Junior had credentials. He blew the trumpet in our band. He had Louis Armstrong lips. He could blow bubbles that covered his face. We encouraged it, just so we could pop them. It took hours to comb the gum out of his scruffy eyebrows. Some people crave attention at any cost. Bubbles do funny things to people.

But Junior got rich. Some say he was the inspired genius with the bright idea of using Botox injections to bubble up the lips of babes. Some say a lot of things. Truth is hard to find these days. But not big lips!

As we got older, bubbles popped up everywhere. Bubble baths boosted population. Financial bubbles bloated bottom lines. Derivative bubbles disappeared into thin air. And more. Sadly, some people even live in bubbles. I’m wondering what the fallout will be when mine bursts.

Life is strange. We transition from diapers to diapers, but the simple things are still the most fun. Even now, bubbles have a magical power…we still chase them, only to have them vanish in our grip. Such is the nature of bubbles…they all burst.

Once upon a time we blew bubbles…the memories are all that remain.

Bud Hearn
April 11, 2013