Little tablets of a hard substance, usually speckled and dull in color. They came in coke (a mottled almost-black), root beer (a mottled brown), cherry (a mottled almost red), grape (a mottled purple) and other flavors, sealed in a cellophane packet, two per section.
In the privacy of one’s kitchen, one took a glass of cool water, large, and kept ice ready. Two of these magnificent tablets of marvelous mystery were removed from their wrappings and dropped into the water, where they instantly sank, started to bubble and seethe, floated up and hissed, dropped to the bottom and roiled about, then floated around, coloring the water and releasing a delightful fragrance. When they were almost completely dissolved, one carefully placed ice in the liquid and presto!
Instant cold soda! A kid’s delight! To make it stronger, one added more fizzies! To irritate Mom, one held one or two in one’s mouth and fizzed colored foam, having to put up with the icky concentrated taste in the process. To be cool, one mixed different flavors. It was great! It was cheap! I think you could put one in a balloon, add a little water and watch the thing inflate!
I think you could even drop them in milk for a cheap, quick ‘ice cream’ soda. Kids learned not to put them in ice cold water, because that slowed their fizz, hot water made them go off too fast, but tap water was fine, and ice added afterwards for a good, cold, carbonated drink.
So, now they’re gone. I don’t even recall their passing. I was too busy growing up, getting an education, getting a job, chasing after girls and becoming ‘mature’ to notice their quiet exit from the grocery shelves. One day, I turned around, and they were gone. Pop rocks, a very poor imitation, had taken their place and kids of the new generation were experimenting with dumping this new stuff in soda. (I told them about peanuts and Coke.)
Gone were my Fizzies, along with Flavor Straws (paper straws coated with flavors that came off when you drank milk with them) glass soda bottles with pressed on caps, and the huge $1 buckets of hot, buttered popcorn in the local theater.
Then a gain, the local theater was gone, replaced by something with lots of small chambers that showed lots of films of different types all at once. My theater had a real stage with real, heavy curtains, a fragrance hard to describe, but something like generations of kids smelling of bubble gum and Ivory soap, popcorn and butter, Boston Baked Beans candy, licorice sticks, peppermint drops, and cigatetts and perfume and the occassional hamburger. (Adults used to be allowed to smoke in it, and it used to be fun to smuggle in a burger or two.)
A rich, lived in scent, steeped in ages of excitement, laughter, tense expectation and delighted screams. (Oops! Sorry. High jacking my own thread! 
)
The new places seem too clean and ‘lifeless’.
So, where did my Fizzies go? Along with real buttermilk and not that crap that either has no real little bitty chunks of golden butter floating in it or tries to fool us by dumping in tapioca. I found the big, red, delightfully scented wax lips – each now packaged individually, and mainly brought out for Halloween. I found the wax bottles, tubes and shapes filled with sweet, sweet colored liquid – but they seem a whole lot smaller than I recall and they are all flat – except for the tubes.
Someone revived Black Jack gum and I spotted packets of cinnamon flavored toothpicks, once a high status symbol of up and coming wannabes of junior high. (You were ‘in’ if you walked around chewing one and even more ‘in’ if you bought cinnamon oil and dipped your pick in it before chewing. It kinda seared your lips and tongue a bit. This was a ‘guy’ thing.)
But, where’s my Fizzies?
