Earthly Pleasures: Cordial Cherry Moment

Driving across town to play music with your friends, you stop at the convenience store to buy a Cherry Coke and a Hershey’s bar with almonds. It is late autumn, blue and golden dark at 5:30 in the afternoon. The two guys behind the counter are arguing about whether this Honda or that Kawasaki is the best motorcycle, but all you can think about is the two-fisted glycemic punch you’re about to administer to your taste buds. The debit card purchase goes through and you scurry to the parking lot. It’s warm in the car and you crack open the cold soda. Your body registers the pleasant contrast between the warm interior of the car and the icy cold exterior of the bottle somewhere just below consciousness. My Bloody Valentine’s “Sometimes” plays on the car stereo as the sugary, cherry-flavored liquid washes down your throat. The bubbles taste something like the way the swirling guitar sounds. You immediately bite off a hunk of the chocolate bar and press the mass against the warm roof of your mouth, where it melds with the Cherry Coke still effervescing there into a cordial cherry experience that carries you back to the one or two times in childhood when you cracked open the regal red box your family received for Christmas and ate one of the strange treats. It felt like a rich, sensuous experience then, a refined luxury heightened by the scarcity of the cherries in the box, and that’s exactly how it feels right now. After a moment—you’re merging onto the highway now, on your way across town—the cordial cherry moment passes and a hard, round almond remains. Take a bite. Now repeat.

Maybe it’s just me.