When  we went through our pantry, we reached way up high and way to the back and found a dusty bag of Paul Newman’s popcorn. So I made it the old-fashioned way, using a regular pan. Summer was fascinated; she wanted it to pop all over the floor. What was that supposedly smart girl thinking? I put oil in the bottom of a large Revere saucepan and threw in five kernels and we all waited for them to pop. Then, while Summer was responding with surprise that they actually had,, I tossed in a lot of popcorn and hoped that my memory would flick onto automatic.

The lid started to push up and so I let it overflow into a waiting pan, then again . . . and again. Nothing caught fire; nothing burned. Summer sampled it and said, “It needs butter.” I told her we had to melt it over low heat – that we used to have midget skillets we used for that purpose. I added that the making of popcorn used to be “an event” – part of the watching of a special TV show, From there, I  went on to tell her that one night a week, a network showed a full-length movie.

That little piece of information hit her forehead and bounced back at me; it was just too primitive to penetrate. Once she tried to process the fact that at one time there was no cable, no videos and no dvds. And, of course, no video games. It was not pretty, watching the thoughts about such a thing percolate behind her eyes. I think her brain almost ground to a halt as a robotic “impossible for life to exist in such a situation” refrain kept popping up.

I don’t remember if we had to hit her with a remote to jar her into a functioning mode or not. We are careful now. I try to ease into talking about such things as a group of us sitting around in the summer, sipping iced tea and reading our own copies of the same novel. I took it for granted that you read instructions or bathroom signs, but that reading was something done with books.

Oh, I started this with the intent of posting this picture of a popper we had when I was a kid. So here it is.