Sweet Thing

I’m amazed at all the fat kids I see walking around these days. Fat kids were a rarity when I was growing up. Back then if you had only the slightest hint of chubbiness you were called 'the fat kid'. By today’s standards, the tubbies of my youth would be considered fit. There is a reason for that, mothers of my childhood had grown up during the depression and never wasted any food. You got exactly what you needed to stay alive. When it came to sweets, my mom was the candy Czar. One piece of candy per child, per day, and of course if you were bad, you got none. Every evening before bedtime my mom would pull out the bag of candy that she kept hidden away in her secret vault, and dole out the one hunk of candy that you’d get all day. My favorite was the orange slices. Blobs of sugary gel in the shape of an orange slice, and coated with even more sugar. It’s no wonder I couldn’t sleep at night.

One other place where we knew we would get a piece of candy was at my dad’s mom’s house. There on her coffee table sat a cut glass candy bowl with a heavy lid that went ‘clank’ if you touched it. Upon entering my grandmother’s house we would all go sit on the couch, and quietly stare at that bowl waiting for grandma, in her heavy German accent, to offer us a piece of candy. None of us would dare sneak a taste before grandma offered it, because we all knew that damn lid would give us away. Mark has a similar candy dish here in our house. If I go and take some candy, the thing makes a loud clank that Mark can hear all the way in the bedroom. He then starts yelling some crap about me eating all the candy. As you can tell, I still eat all the candy I want. That’s because Mark isn’t my mom, or my grandmother, and I’m not nearly as afraid of him.