At age 70 I may have solved one of the little
mysteries of my childhood.
When I was young my grandfather was the postmaster of
Glen Ferris, West Virginia. The post office was located within our company
store, so Grandpop also ran the store. If he wasn’t sitting at his desk behind
the postal cage, he was standing behind the counter of the store in a white butcher’s
apron waiting on customers.
I loved to go into the store and visit Grandpop. I
also loved popsicles. Against a back wall of the store sat a long, low freezer
like the one Aunt Bea had on her back porch in The Andy Griffith Show. It contained varieties of ice cream. I would
open the heavy top and look into that freezer often because I had noticed that sometimes
one or two of the popsicles were broken.
Two attached “pops” on sticks constituted one
popsicle, but sometimes only one half remained in the wrapper. I called them “extra
halves,” and when I found one I knew no customer would buy it; therefore, it
was free. My friends and I enjoyed many extra halves as well as the thrill of
finding them in Grandpop’s freezer.
This morning I was remembering those days and I
thought: How did the extra halves get
into the freezer? Who ate the missing halves of the popsicles? A customer
wouldn’t have paid for a popsicle and left half of it in the store.
It
had to be Grandpop!
Maybe my grandfather munched on part of a popsicle
while he stocked the shelves or had a few minutes between customers and then
put the rest into the freezer for later. Or maybe he did it for me, knowing I had
discovered a great treasure in those abandoned pieces. That mystery won’t be
solved, but either way, imagining my grandpop in his store apron, bending over to put popsicle parts in the freezer so many years ago, gave me a smile.
