No digressions this time!

Some quotes lodge in your mind. I once interviewed the mother of a 5-year-old boy who had been raped by a janitor at a suburban day care center.

When she found out, she had immediately called the police.

"I expected them to show up in five minutes with sirens blaring and lights flashing," she said.

Instead, they took her name and said they'd get back to her.

The circumstances seem only slightly different in the R. Kelly case. His supposed victim was 13 or 14 instead of 5. And the alleged perpetrator, a pop star not a janitor.

But as new evidence emerges -- slowly, thanks to Judge Vincent Gaughan's secret hearings, an insult in a free society -- we have to keep in mind the true scandal here. The true scandal isn't that R. Kelly caught a break because he's famous. The true scandal is that these sex abuse cases often are allowed to slide into limbo and be forgotten. The janitor was never even arrested.

The other item that reached its end before the root beer was my visit last weekend to the orchestra recital in Villa Park. Afterward, we were driving home down North Avenue when we passed the venerable Hamburger Heaven at North and York.

It was 10:30 a.m., a little early for lunch under normal circumstances. But we had eaten early and lightly, in our scramble to get to the competition on time, and besides, how often does one find a hamburger stand exuding quaintness, one that isn't part of a 10,000-unit chain?

If McDonald's is ersatz in every aspect, from its friendly/scary clown to its "shakes," then Hamburger Heaven is its opposite. The food came in a plain brown paper bag. There was no ice in the root beer, because ice is unnecessary.

"It comes out cold, on tap," explained employee Sue Carter. "If we put ice in it, it would be watered down."

How fresh is the Richardson's root beer they serve? They make it as they need it.

"Three Saturdays ago, we were really busy, and we made it three times in one day," said Carter.

Each of us ordered root beer, and we immediately compared it to the gold standard -- Carlson's Drive-in in Michigan City -- and decided that it didn't have the same fall-to-your-knees-and-sing-hallelujah impact, but then again it wasn't August, and that might be a factor.

The most amazing thing was the ketchup. Our onion rings came with packets of Red Gold ketchup, from the Red Gold Company of Elmwood, Ind.

Red Gold. Who knew? I assumed that behemoths Heinz and Hunt's had divided the ketchup world between them long ago. Finding Red Gold was like going to a restaurant that serves RC Cola instead of Coke or Pepsi.

Not that it tasted any different, as far as I could tell. It's ketchup. It tastes like ketchup. But just knowing that it is made of Indiana tomatoes, that it isn't coming in from the tomato fields of Yemen in giant tanker ships, was somehow bracing in these dreary economic times.

I later browsed the Red Gold Web site, the first truly quaint corporate home page I have ever seen. A characteristic entry from their timeline:

"1962: Ernie Reichart is elected president of the Indiana Canners Association. His heartfelt speech ['An Indiana Canner Speaks His 'Piece'] at the November 1963 state convention is roundly applauded, and congratulatory letters pour in [all saying, in effect, 'Attaboy Ernie.']"

I called Theresa Warren, assistant brand manager at Red Gold, who bragged there are no snooty East or West coast tomatoes in Red Gold ketchup.

"They're all grown mostly in Indiana," she said. "We do have a few growers in Northern Kentucky or Southern Michigan, just in case of bad weather."

I asked how the taste of Red Gold ketchup stacks up to Heinz -- a slow pitch down the pipe if ever there was one -- and she knocked it onto Waveland Avenue.

"We believe ours is the more tomato taste," she said.

She is shipping a bottle, and I will let you know how it compares.

Root beer.

Sorry, I have to cut to the chase, because the last few attempts I never even got to the root beer I was trying to write about, and it's beginning to get frustrating.

The item last week where my 10-year-old and I were sitting in Harry Caray's, talking about ballplayers? It was supposed to lead into the label of the Goose Island Root Beer he was drinking, emblazoned with the following boast: "Made with 100% Real Sugar for Better Taste."

Come full circle, haven't we? It wasn't so long ago that the concept of "sugar" was a commercial kiss of death. "Sugar Smacks" became "Honey Smacks," as products lunged to find other ways to describe the white granular stuff inside them.

Now we've been so overwhelmed with cheap artificial sweeteners and corn syrup and whatever that sugar suddenly has charm, and all sorts of warm, fuzzy, mom-like connotations. It's also expensive, and expense equals status in our world.

Another soda pop is so proud of using real sugar it has incorporated it into its name: "Jones Pure Cane Soda."

"Good old soda made with pure cane sugar," it brags on the back. "No hidden meanings, no billion-dollar ad campaigns, and no high fructose corn syrup."

Loathe as I am to argue with a soda bottle label, but everything has hidden meanings. Or not so hidden. Sugar nostalgia obviously means that we're tired of consuming the cheapest possible hellbroth of chemicals that agri-business can conspire to shot-inject into a container, we're weary of eating things that are extruded and then harden rather than being mixed and then baked.

This, from Arj Barker, may be too true to be funny. But I like it:

I was high on life, but eventually I built up a tolerance.