Royal Crown Rules

When it comes to cola, I'm one of those oddballs.

Coke or Pepsi? Neither, please: I much prefer RC Cola. Or as I persist in sometimes calling it, Royal Crown Cola.

I first really got into RC back when I was living in Dubuque. We're talking the fall of 1982 or thereabouts. And I've been drinking it ever since.

When I was a kid, Milo's neighborhood grocery store in my home town in Wisconsin used to carry all sorts of pop. Coke. Pepsi. RC Cola. Home-Ade Cola. Double Cola. Patio Diet Cola. Cola. Nehi Root Beer. Hires Root Beer. Dad's Root Beer. Mason's Root Beer. Bon-Ton Root Beer. Fauerbach Root Beer. Root Beer. Mason's Strawberry Soda. Nehi Strawberry Soda. Fauerbach Strawberry Soda. Strawberry Soda. Mason's Orange Soda. Sun-Rise Orange Soda. Fanta Imitation Orange Soda. Nesbitt's Orange Soda. Graf's Orange Soda. Orange Soda. Nehi Grape Soda. Sun-Rise Grape Soda. White Soda. Black Cherry Soda. Cherry Soda. Black Cherry Blossoms Soda. 7-Up. Ski. 50|50. Cheer Up. Upper 10. Bubble-Up. Sprite. Fresca. Canada Dry Ginger Ale. Bon-Ton Ginger Ale. Roxo Ginger Ale. Par-T-Pak Pale Dry Ginger Ale. Mountain Dew (with a hillbilly— "Yahoo! Mountain Dew! It's goo-ood!"). I'm reading most of these names off my old bottlecap collection, which I still have.

But there's one brand that bothers me, because I can't remember if it ever actually existed, or if it's just something I had a dream about, many years ago. It was a creme soda called Canadian Creme. Clear glass bottle, with a scene on it of ducks flying over a cat-tail marsh. And both scene and brand name were printed on the bottle in a mirror-reflective gold. I wonder if I dreamed that one.