A Little Like Andy

by Marsha Ward

I'm feeling a bit fractious today, with all the little glitches in my life that I'm having to endure, so here's a mini-essay a la Andy Rooney of 60 Minutes.

During the cold weather this winter, my mind wandered over a lot of options for keeping warm. At one point, I determined that if I kept my core temperature warm, maybe my skin wouldn't think it was so cold. I mulled over drinks of the warm-to-hot variety, since one can only ingest so much soup.

I don't drink coffee--never have--so that's out.

Hot chocolate is nice, but it has its limitations. Too much of it will send me packing into a small room of my home for long spells of time, where I won't be very productive.

Hot apple cider is okay if it's fresh, but the dried, packaged version has too many chemicals for my taste.

I settled on Postum, a roasted grain beverage from my childhood. It comes in two varieties: regular, and coffee flavor. Like I said, I don't drink coffee, so I set about looking for the regular stuff in my local grocery stores.

I looked and looked. In vain, it seems. Needing something, I bought Pero, which is made from barley, but I'd never tried it before. It's not quite the same flavor as Postum.

Since I don't like to be a quitter, the next time I was in town, I looked in another store, but they didn't even have Pero. I was with a friend, and when I was trundling my groceries out to the car, I mentioned my search.

"Oh, they don't make it anymore," she said.

"What?" I rejoined. "They don't make Postum?"

"I even called Kraft Foods, and no, they don't make it." My friend looked as downcast as I felt. "I have one last jar, and I'm nursing it along."

This is dreadful, folks. Postum has been on the market since 1895! When I moved, a friend helped me, and she threw out my jars of Postum, telling me I could buy more. Well, I can't. And that just stinks! I'm unhappy, Kraft Foods.