GREEN EXTRA
The funny ways that we get permission to grow up.
We probably all know that the senses of smell and taste are related to each other and that they are strongly tied to memory and emotion. I try to pay attention when I smell or taste something that makes me feel something strongly.
Recently I tasted (and smelled) what I used to call “Green Extra.” It is the Spearmint Flavor of Wrigley’s Extra chewing gum that comes in stick form inside the foil wrappers inside of a green package. I chewed it often during my last year of high school and up through college.
I loved and can remember specifically relishing the taste of the gum long after I had been chewing it for a good while. “Extra flavor lasts an extra long time” as their jingle suggested held true to my experience.
But there is a little side memory and a sensation that I attach to this gum, this taste, and this smell. I started buying it and chewing it when I was working-out with a guy who was a year older than me. We have since become better friends, he was in my wedding, he is married to my cousin. I consider him family. Patrick had played quarterback at the big public high school while I played at the smaller private school in town. He was a year ahead of me in school and so he had gone off to play college football and returned home during the summer before I would go walk-on the football team at Ole Miss. To be clear, we were on different planes of athletic existence, but we worked out some during one of those summers. Patrick would always have a “Plen-T-Pack”of green extra that he would share with me.
The key to the memory is that he would always hand me two pieces.
“Nah, you gotta have two pieces. Don’t you think?”
I remember feeling like this was generous, but also there was something about it that turned on a light switch in my boyhood heart.
If you want two pieces, eat two pieces. Just because they make them one size, does not mean that that is the best way to partake of them. If you like to eat two pieces of gum at once, do it. He did not say all of that, but that is what I took away.
I do not know how conscious I was of it even then. BUT, earlier this year when I tasted the gum, it reminded me of when I first started chewing two pieces of gum at once, not waiting for one’s flavor to fade. Was it wasteful? Who knows, who cares? It’s gum.
I texted Patrick about it this summer.
ME:
P, Do you remember chewing that green Extra gum? You turned me on to it that summer that you and Ginny were dating and we worked out together sometimes. You would always chew two pieces at once and offered/insisted that I take two pieces. I remember a light coming on for me. “I am an adult, if I want to eat two pieces at once, then just do it”
His reply was that he did remember, and that eating two pieces was a “straight up copycat move” that he had gotten from one of his mentors. No words exchanged. He saw him do it, and thought, “of course.”
It is funny how as boys growing up we slowly realize that we have permission to do things that we didn’t know we had. Sometimes we need it said to us, sometimes we just need someone to show us.
