Ingredients are bought for a recipe made once every 10 years. One to two teaspoons are drawn from a hand sized bottle leaving ounces left behind to wait for the next time you decide to experiment. Will it still be good the next time? How can you tell? These products are good at maintaining their look, smell, and one assumes, flavour.

It is interesting to note how a product’s packaging changes over time, and how it doesn’t. And why don’t they use this font anymore? The spacing of the letters reminds me of laying in the sun at my cabin, reading my father’s and his brother’s old comic books and wondering if the mail order ads for novelty items, the magic manual to get that beach bod, and a set of 1001 tiny little green soldiers were still applicable.

The above bottle was bought sometime in the late 70s. Below, before that. There is no UPC on the bottle. Could it have been on a box? I somehow doubt that. This bottle has history. It has the number ‘23′ which at sometime meant something to someone. Now it means nothing and the life of this bottle that has existed all my life will soon end. Should the toss happened on the 23rd at 23:23? Then the story of Brandy could be that it spent the majority of its life time marked with a symbol of its own fate.

Then the peppermint extract. This was a toy. Not a toy but an essential ingredient to many potions crafted in yogurt containers. If only I could have figured out the right combination of flour, shampoo, corn syrup and the green stuff…

This is produced or distributed by Nabob Foods Limited, Vancouver, Canada (according to back of bottle). That is the same Nabob as Nabob Coffee, before they changed their name to Nabob Coffee and long before the company was acquired by Kraft. I wonder when Nabob Foods Limited stopped existing. Could the UPC on the back help? It is only 6 digits long: 600162. Googling is fruitless.

I came back to Regina yesterday. Here over the weekend. It is good to see family and friends again, though confronting the remnants of myself in this city is hard. This time, more so than last Christmas, I feel like I’ve changed so much and I am wondering what parts of my past identities, if any, should I hold onto.