Ice cold memory

Divine Word Seminary or "P-burg,"
as it was known at the other
SVD seminaries in the US.

Summertime, mid-1960s. I don't remember the year, for certain. I was at
my high school, Divine Word Seminary, a few miles upriver—the Maumee River—from Perrysburg, Ohio. It was an all-male boarding school, termed a "prep" seminary by the SVDs, known in English-speaking countries as the Divine Word Missionaries. The SVDs (the Societas Verbi Divini), a Roman Catholic religious order, operated several high school seminaries in the US, preparing young men for a college education and advanced religious training prior to entering the priesthood as missionaries.

The Maumee River, above the deepwater head of navigation. 

Along with a few other guys, I'd volunteered for some manner of hot weather duty. Maybe it was helping out with one of the vocational retreats for grade school boys or maybe it was some other sort of clean-up chores; the exact reason for my presence has faded with time.

What I do remember is finishing up, tired, hot and sweaty, and all of us heading up to the main building, where the Father with whom we'd been working promised us some cold Cokes. The five or six of us pulled several chairs together in a corner of the dining room, a roughly forty-by-sixty-foot expanse enclosed on three sides by floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the woodlot leading down to the river. It was an impressive setting, remarkable even by adolescent standards.

A couple minutes later, Father Whoever brought out a case of twenty-four

ten-ounce bottles and informed us he'd had them chilling in the freezer so they'd be plenty cold. And hope to tell, they were that! There were already a few tiny ice crystals that were floating on top and that cold, sweet, tangy liquid drained down my throat like nothing before. I was sitting with my schoolmates, talking and laughing, enjoying the contentment of a job well done and, as I've come to know, drinking the most satisfying drink of my life. We finished off the case.

Coke is still my favorite soft drink. Ever since, I've often recalled that time of a half century ago when enjoying an extra-cold Coke. As the one I was just imbibing when I decided to write this story. And no, I never became a priest.

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