Reflecting on the full span of my life, I find that there are certain activities I have always enjoyed doing. I have “graduated” from the time where employment defined much of my daily motions and desires, and I now have the opportunity to discover what it is I “really” want to do. Given this mandate, reflecting on the pleasures of my childhood may be a way to understand some of the energies I have now.
One of my earliest memories of growing up in the 1950s is the weekly trip to shop for groceries with my mother. We always went to Furr’s grocery store, where I was consistently shuffled into the grocery cart seat, facing backwards from the cart’s movement down the isles. Most of the items on the shelves were unknown to me, making the tour a complete adventure, comparable in every way to a storybook journey. My limited exposure to the full range of available items meant the excitement was not focused on the candy isle, but on the full color vibrancy that filled the shelves from the floor to well above my head. Even the fresh vegetables hinted at flavors, textures, and smells designed in foreign lands for the purpose of transporting the palette and psyche permanently into another dimension, well beyond the fantasy of regulated 1950s normality. Each vegetable required initiation into an ancient ritual as the necessary prerequisite for eating. Corn on the cob must be excavated from inside a papyrus husk. Asparagus spears are branches from sacred trees. Carrots have 24” long green tops, the axis mundi still attached. What great knowledge and skill must be acquired before these reliquary objects can find their way into one’s mouth?
At the front end of the second grocery store isle there was a special display that was one of my favorites. The display always featured “ZIP” potato chips. The brand name ZIP always gave me the impression that the chips were a bit ahead of the game: modern and space-age advanced. The bag itself, made of waxy green and yellow paper, was innovative because it did not use the tins that many other products came in. But what endeared me the most to ZIP chips was the slogan prominently displayed on each bag: “ZIP IS A PIP OF A CHIP”. Not that I understood what the slogan meant - I had no idea at all what a Pip was - but for some reason it sounded vaguely British, so I felt culturally uplifted eating the chips.
It is true that the word “Pip” is used in British literature, such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s story The Five Orange Pips (pips as seeds) and there was P.G. Wodehouse’s, Jeeves in the Offing (“It would be fatal to risk giving her the pip in any way.”) However these writings were well beyond the perimeter of my limited knowledge growing up in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
I later learned the true meaning of the word “Pip” as in ZIP IS A PIP OF A CHIP, is more mundane, limited to people who have some exposure to agriculture. It relates to an activity equally enthralling as the grocery store adventure -- shopping at the hardware store. Shopping at the hardware store was a common activity of the time, because in addition to plumbing and construction items, the hardware store sold farm supplies such as animal feed, and tools, and the favorite of all children – baby chicks - hundreds of yellow baby chicks all “peeping” and “popping” while they ran around under a cover of heat lamps. Each year in the spring, children from all over the neighborhood came to the hardware store to see the chicks, and sometimes to purchase them to take home. Over the summer the chicks would grow, and in our neighborhood roosters would crow in the morning to wake everyone up. What I didn’t fully realize at the time was the obvious fact that chicks come from eggs. From my own understanding, and my visit to the hardware store, chicks were obviously something you buy, not something that is born.
Growing up has many blessings, and one of them is being able to pull back the wizard’s curtain to see that chickens are a part of the great life cycle: emerging from shells, taken home by children (and adults), being raised and fed, and eventually becoming part of the food chain. In New Mexico in the 1950s, most rural people would have known that the word PIP referred to the very first “chip” a chick was able to knock out of the egg shell wall. It was the start of life – the very first view of a world completely unknown and unseen until that moment, with infinite possibilities and incomprehensible shapes, movements, vibrations and sounds.
The PIP made by the chick was a first look at the amazing life ahead.
ZIP IS A PIP OF A CHIP
I love this! Have you considered publishing a book of short stories? I think you should. Great words to start my day. Thank you
What a pip of a story! I remember Pip from Great Expectations by Dickens, he could have been named Chip as well.