By: Dennis P. Carman, President & CEO of United Way of Greater Plymouth County.
Let me start yet another of my offbeat blog posts by acknowledging that I know soda is unhealthy for you. In truth, as I’ve grown older, I’ve found it’s much better for my digestive system to avoid carbonated drinks of any kind. Ah, but when I was younger, I was pretty darn fond of the stuff.
Where I grew up, however, just outside of New Haven, CT, there was a company called Castle Beverages that delivered wooden crates of 30 or so small 7-ounce bottles every few weeks of almost any flavored soda you could imagine. I have an older and a younger brother, each of us a year and a half apart in age, and we could hardly stand the wait for the next delivery of Castle soda to arrive. Sure, there was your common cola, root beer, and orange sodas, but there was also black raspberry, lemon-lime, white birch beer, strawberry, and a hundred different offerings; a feast of flavors that were both delicious and colorfully displayed in their rustic wooden containers, carefully compartmentalized by their different flavors and colors.
I don’t know whether my brothers and I outgrew Castle soda or whether we may have simply been lured to the mainstream by marketers along with everyone else to drink either Coke or Pepsi in mass quantities. At some point either during or soon after my college days, I discovered Dr. Pepper, and as a fan for many years, I would contend that there is something very special about this beverage.
Very recently, I learned that Dr. Pepper is the oldest soft drink in this country, having been created by a pharmacist in Waco, Texas in 1885. At some point, I was also infected with that “earworm” of a jingle, “I’m a Pepper! He’s a Pepper! She’s a Pepper! Wouldn’t you like to be a Pepper too?”
But the big thing for me about Dr. Pepper is that it claims to owe its unique and wonderful taste to the fact that there are 23 different flavors that have been all mixed together to make this special elixir. For those who are the kind of people who need to know these kinds of things, those 23 flavors are a top secret of the company, but mega fans of Dr Pepper believe the 23 flavors are (in alphabetical order) amaretto, almond, blackberry, black licorice, caramel, carrot, clove, cherry, cola, ginger, juniper, lemon, molasses, nutmeg, orange, prune, plum, pepper, root beer, rum, raspberry, tomato, and vanilla. Regardless of whether you agree with its mega fans or cynically believe that this is just another marketing ploy, I would like to respectfully suggest that Dr Pepper offers us an important lesson that we can apply to our world as it struggles to reconcile its differences in order to achieve some workable unity. What if we could pour all of our incredible knowledge, our creative perspectives, and our unique talents into a reservoir that we might all be able to draw from, and drink from, if you will.
By now you may be asking, what does soda pop have to do with sarees?
Last week, I was blessed to be part of a very special event at Bridgewater State University that showcased “diversity” at its very finest. One of our Board members of United Way of Greater Plymouth Couty had an idea of putting together an evening of Bangali fashion, and thus “Saree Saree Night” gathered over two dozen beautiful and diverse people who modeled equally gorgeous garments from that part of the world. Please take a moment or two to enjoy the photo below and to reacquaint yourself with that venerable truth that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Perhaps one day in our not-so-distant future, we may be able to look back on another venerable truth, that “the strength of our unity will be found in our diversity”.
Community Voices for Health 