I thought I would continue my thoughts of yesterday with the milk story. The ice cream was pretty special, but chocolate milk day was also one of the best memories of my youth.

On hot summer afternoons we would ride the few miles to the dairy when they would be packaging milk in the little half-pint waxy cardboard containers that we all know. They supplied the school with white and chocolate milk that they would draw out of the big stainless steel tanks, icy cold into those little boxes as they moved down the conveyor to be sealed and packed.

My friends and I were allowed to stand down at the end of the line and watch them as they sealed and packed them into the big milk crates and moved them to the cooler where they would wait to be transported to the stores and the schools. The beauty of standing by the line was that there are always a certain number of the cartons that didn't seal and the milk would leak. We were allowed to have as many of those as we could hold since it was going to be thrown away anyway.

I can't tell you how many times we filled up on that icy cold, really fresh chocolate milk and then jumped back on our bikes for the ride home in the hot afternoon sun. You could feel the milk sloshing around in your belly and by the time we got home it was all we could do to keep from throwing up from the combination of cold milk, hot sun, and hard riding. I remember thinking that I was never going to do that again because of the belly ache....and in a few days we would be right back at it again. Some lessons just aren't meant to stick when the rewards outweigh the risks I guess.