The oddest things sometimes light the match that flame a memory. Tonight I’m driving down Route 2 west, headed to Fitchburg and I’m about halfway there, in Lancaster. Now, I know I’ve mentioned here at some point that whenever I drive by the old Orchard Hills Skating Rink (which is now a roller skating rink), it brings me back to my childhood. A few miles before that, though, there’s a large tank, up on a hill in the distance, which you can see from Route 2 there as you roll through Lancaster. It’s the way we sometimes drove to the rink when I was a kid.

Today, the tank is painted a solid, pea green. But as I drove tonight, I looked in the distance at the tank and remembered the many times I sat in the back seat of the family car, with the bottom half of my hockey equipment on, staring out the window as the miles went by. Back then, the tank wasn’t pea green, it was red and white checkerboard. I can still easily picture it. Funny how much detail you can rememeber about certain things that are from 30 years ago, but sometimes you can’t remember last week.

Anyway, when I was a kid, I always associated that red and white checkerboard tank with Purina Puppy Chow. Because that’s what we gave our dog back then and the bag had the red and white checkerboard on it. It is, then, perfectly logical that when I was a kid, I thought the big tank held dog food, since both had the red/white thing going. As a logical adult, it sounds ludicrous, of course. But as a kid, it just made sense.