- It’s possible that we were poor at the time. We were never poor poor, but
I do remember a period of reduced-price lunch tickets and powdered milk.
So it may be that Five Alive time coincided with that time. Between jobs.
I seem to recall that she was apologetic, ashamed about the non-juice juice.
If that’s the case, she shouldn’t have been. But there’s nothing I can tell her now. - Maybe people were less discerning back then. I see that Five Alive had
60% real juice and 100% refreshment. That doesn’t sound too bad.
In another few years, Sunny Delight would come along and try to
convince people that it, too, was juice, and that cool kids in sunglasses
were all-fired desperate for Sunny D offered by the coolest of moms. - Moms aren’t really cool. (I am one.) Sometimes, we get frustrated, and
if these damn kids think I’m going to pay real orange juice money
day after day to fill their glass so they can sit there, letting it get warm,
or gulp it down in three seconds and never once say, Wow, Mom!
Thank you for serving us real orange juice, well then. We’ll just see. - Because she had a 30₵ coupon, and that’s not nothing, you know?
It expired in 1980, at the very end of that year. Where were we then?
Thief River Falls, Minnesota, my father out of work. That brings me
back to No. 1 on this list. I don’t know if everyone associated
Five Alive with poverty, but I know I got that idea from somewhere. - Come on now — it was the ’70s (or 1980, as I’ve said). Everything
was about 60% real, and no one cared, unless you went in the other
direction — macrobiotics and all of that. A lot of us drank Hi-C
after school, from a giant tin can with triangles punched in the lid.
A lot of us drank Five Alive in the morning, before we left our mothers._______________________________________________________________________________________
Today’s prompt at Imaginary Garden with Real Toads was to write a list poem that involves “five.” I swear that mine had carefully considered line breaks, but you won’t see them because WordPress is confused by poems with long lines. Just trust me.
(Posted by another member of a Facebook group called Off the Rack – Retail Memories. I’m going to assume that Snow Crop doesn’t care.)
Marilyn Rauch Cavicchia 
I see your line breaks.
Interesting piece of memoir.
Such a heartfelt write, Marilyn!💞
I have really come to enjoy your poetic voice in this month of poetry writing. You have a unique way of telling your stories.. like this poem is not about orange juice at all.