I'm not a great multi tasker.  Cristie has been posting wonderful poetry on her blog for the past several months and my prose has all but withered and died. It seems I can't read her offerings and then conjure up my own. Hers is mine vicariously. We are truly one; she posts and I'm dry.

But.....I did have a thought today. I enjoyed a nice cold, thirst quenching can of Squirt on ice, while in my office working on my computer.

As it's sweet goodness revived me, I thought of my history with this ubiquitous beverage.

A lady who worked for a soft drink company used to live near my Aunt Sergene. When I was oh, maybe nine or ten, Serge would get cases of an unlabeled soft drink from this lady to try out. I guess Serge and her family were part of a marketing test or something. We would get an occasional case of the stuff ourselves. We all liked it and were glad to get it. Turns out it was Squirt. It came on the market a year or two after the test was over. The test product had actual little pieces of grapefruit in it, like the pulp in orange juice. Otherwise, it was the same Squirt you have tasted.

My Squirt saga turned tragic. Awhile later, the soft drink lady was bludgeoned to death in her home one night, just a few houses away from Sergene's. No one knew why she was killed; at least it was never made public. She was there and then she was gone, and we kids were left to walk slowly by her dark house and wonder what horrors were still inside. My adult relatives talked about how awful it all was, and then we just got on with our lives. I don't remember it ever being revealed who the killer was. Maybe it was a Pepsi executive.