MILKED

Never saw him. He brought milk. Whole milk until my preteens. Two percent thereafter. He brought whole cream and half & half and after Thanksgiving he brought a quart of eggnog every other week up until Christmas. Bottles were glass. There were quart bottles and half gallon bottles and they all had orange lettering painted on their sides. Eggnog had green lettering and holly sprigs. Bottle caps were heavy foiled paper. They were difficult to reseal. All bottles were festooned with the Atlanta Dairies logo.

Milkman delivered milk to our house around three a.m. twice a week. Milk was left in a small metal crate with the Atlanta Dairies logo in its front. At the end of the month a bill was rolled and placed in the middle of the bottles. Most of the time it was wet from dew or condensation from the bottles and it would be spread out on the kitchen counter wet until it dried enough to where mom or dad could sign it and write out a check for the amount.

The milk was good. Cream seals sat on top. I pulled the clotted cream off the top with my fingers and ate it. It tasted like butter. The eggnog was dense and creamy and tasted of nutmeg on the finish. I can remember going downstairs for milk in the middle of the night and turning up the bottle and bubbling it. It was so cold it didn't have a taste. It was only liquid cold and running down my throat.

Don't think I ever went to sleep when I was supposed to. I stayed up most nights reading horror comics or Robert Howard pulp or Savage Sword or Jules Verne. I read with a flashlight. Later I got bold enough to turn on my bedside lamp, but I sat it on the floor so the light would not shine so bright through the window. When I heard the milkman's truck I knew it was late and it was time to go to sleep.

Atlanta Dairies raised the prices of their milk one year too high for mom or dad and they cancelled the service. They bought milk from Golden Gallon, a small store in the middle of a strip mall that sold only milk and milk products. In the spring and summer they sold slurpees: Coke or Cherry. Atlanta Dairies folded not long after that I think. Or they were bought by some other company. Whatever the case, it was never the same. There's no such thing as the milkman any more. No one brings milk to houses in glass bottles in crates. If you want milk with cream top you have to buy Nature's Creamery from Kalona, Iowa. Good luck finding that milk.