I should have seen it coming. There has been a militant group plotting for years how to make cough drops taste worse, and they have been highly successful in marketing things that should never be put in a human mouth. And we bought them.
They don’t really make you better. They just make you appreciate when you were only hacking most of your internal organs out of place, but weren’t yet mutilating your tastebuds.
I’m pretty sure I must have bought the wrong batch of cough drops one time. Somebody told me a certain brand was a little more expensive, but way more effective than the usual brand. My first thought when it began to dissolve in my mouth was, “Whoa! Were these like, supposed to be cleaning pods for the toilet? Because they’re about to be.”
I think I get it. If you’re about to die from days of incessant coughing, why not just take one of these, and finish the job?

It’s not nearly as cruel as some of the fruit-flavored ones. I mean, go ahead and call it menthol flavored. That way, you go into this with your eyes wide open (but you kind of have to peel your lips apart). But it’s short of diabolical to call a cough drop cherry. I can think of a lot of names for this thing besides cherry.
It also says things on the package like soothing and vapor. They have you believing you have a bite-size humidifier in your mouth, only to find out it’s a 20-minute commitment to chemistry lab aroma flashbacks. Which tempts you to go ahead and break it down with your teeth and get it over with. Don’t.
And all this is usually in church. Here’s the thing. I know if I pop one of those things what’s going to happen, so I’m really fidgeting and forcing coughs back down the throat at least half the time, but there’s that person. There’s always that one person, usually about 113 years old, two rows in front of you, who digs in her purse to pass you a cough drop left over from the Reagan administration. The paper adheres to it like an eleven-year old to a cell phone – they're just inseparable. So I accept that I’m not only going to ingest the bad taste vapor honey menthol nugget, but 30 percent of the paper it was wrapped in. That should solve everything.
And so – I don’t even know quite how to say this. The soup company – SOUP! Soup, people! – came out with a soup drop to allow us to experience the aroma and flavor of chicken soup in a piece of candy.
I don’t want chicken soup in a drop. I like it in a bowl. I can just imagine the people on the pew next to me. (Pew taking on a whole new meaning.) It’s not enough that the soothing vapors have called attention to us for years. Now, it’s like, who smells like Grandma’s kitchen, and did the fellowship meal move to the main auditorium?
Well, chalk it up to American capitalism, but the soup drops sold out in the first hour they were introduced. People will apparently try anything, and race to be the first one to do it.
I was always a little hesitant about grabbing a copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul in the nineties. I was pretty sure my soul needed something a little less tangible and more substantial like salvation, redemption, and resounding joy because of it.
Chicken soup for the soul didn’t cut it for me. Call me crazy – I’ve been called worse – but I’m not too interested in chicken soup for the throat either.
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