Jingle scoop

Life doesn't follow a formula or a script. It's not a serial. Life has more in common with a dream sequence than with a storybook -- less 24, more Twin Peaks.

Likewise thought.

Moment to moment, our thoughts can stray unexpectedly, tripping over revelation or pitching headlong into canyons of memory. When we're wise, in quiet times we choose to follow these threads wherever they lead, surfing waves of contemplation, emotion, genius.

Reading this morning what I posted yesterday, I stopped on a phrase:

"...brought it here from Oregon in 40 hours..."

Suddenly, a fragment floated out of memory and into conscious thought -- a line from a 1960s advertising jingle, of all things, complete with soundtrack:

"...get that juice up to Lawson's in 40 hours..."

Say, what?

Lawson's stores and the familiar milk-bottle signs were icons of my Heartland youth. Founded not far from where I grew up in northeastern Ohio, Lawson's was among the first chains of what we've come to call "convenience stores" and featured its own brand of dairy products, juices and other staples. The jingle was part of a television commercial promoting Lawson's orange juice and the (perhaps mythical) "Big-O" tanker trucks that hauled it directly from Florida to Ohio for bottling.

Now, one man sleeps while the other man drives
On the non-stop Lawson run;
And the cold, cold juice
In the tank-truck caboose
Stays as fresh as the Florida sun.

Roll on, Big-O!
Get that juice up to Lawson's in 40 hours.

Black-and-white TV, by the way. Glass bottles.

The reminiscence I've described is so inconsequential as to be trivial. It's but a fleck of childhood memory, the recalling of a once-thriving enterprise that a series of acquisitions ground into dust. I find it ironic that 8,500 Lawson's signs now beckon shoppers throughout Japan, but that the symbol has vanished from our own national landscape.

The memory remains.