Novel Blog - Writing The Great American Novel

I used to collect bottle caps. At eight or nine years old, it was a quest to collect as many as possible and as fast as possible. In our house, it was Pepsi's. At grandma's you got RC Cola and Dr. Pepper. I don't remember too many Coca-Cola bottle caps. Come to think of it, where I grew up, no one really drank Coca-Cola's (and they still don't).

I'm not sure I remember the exact number, but it was almost enough bottle caps to fill up an empty 5 gallon plastic lard can. It must have been tens of thousands. O.k. maybe it was only tens of hundreds, but it was alot. (I wish I still had them.)

I later graduated to 16 ounce returnable bottles. I remember asking the neighbors for them, relatives for them, and like finding a lost treasure - finding several of them in trash cans at the city park and wondering how anyone could possibly just throw them away. I even pedaled my bike several miles down the black top in either direction from our home, picking them up, and riding home with half a gunny sack full. On Saturday's we'd take them to Foster's General Store and exchange them for 10 cents each. If you could scrounge up three or four of them, you had enough money to buy a bottle of ice cold Pepsi from the vending machine.

Ahh...those were the good ole days.