One Bite, and It Is 1969

     Four words. Atkinson’s Peanut Butter Bar.

     Every once in a while you come upon that thing that transports you back in time. Something that takes hold of your senses and demands to be acknowledged. That is what Atkinson’s Peanut Butter Bars do for me.

     One bite, and I am almost 6 years old. It is 1969. Neil Armstrong has just landed on the moon. I am standing in my grandmother’s living room. On the mantel is a red bird toy; you know the one. It is a glass beaker bird with liquid in a sphere at one end and a felted head and beak at the other. Through some principle of displacement or other physical property, the bird dips its beak as if to eat, then rises to swallow, and dips again. THAT is the power of the senses.

     Sometimes the reaction hits me from out of nowhere. I found myself in tears twice this Christmas season when the old bluegrass tune, Christmastime’s A Comin’, played in my truck. I could see my daddy picking his Yamaha and hear him singing.

     Can’t you hear those bells ringin’, ringin’

     Joy, joy, hear them singin’

     When it’s snowin’ I’ll be goin’

     Back to my country home.

     Just like the peanut butter bar, the song brought back vivid memories. It’s 1974 and Christmastime in a bead-boarded living room. The tree is a scratchy cedar disguised by hundreds of silver string icicles. There’s no tree stand. The trunk is wedged in a metal coffee can filled with rocks. Twine wrapped around the trunk is anchored to the wooden wall on two sides to make sure the tree doesn’t fall. But it’s mostly my daddy’s voice that I hear. He’s seated forward on a chair to rest the guitar’s curve on his knee while the pick in his hand finds the exact string at the exact time to make that guitar sing. Powerful.

     The same thing happens when I smell pine straw in the sun or sip Coke from a glass-bottle with a neck full of peanuts.

     Time travel is entirely possible, and there is some comfort in knowing that all I need to do it is to grab an Atkinson’s Peanut Butter Bar to make it happen. The hard, splintery, wood-grained rectangle looks like a block of wood, but in my mouth it is nostalgia.