Sweets I Have Known

Fruit leather is my childhood.  I wasn’t allowed to have candy per se, but fruit leather was somehow deemed healthier and therefore allowable.  Not fruit by the foot, or fruit roll up, fruit leather.  It was a really unhip, healthy kind of candy.

Everlasting gobstoppers don’t just exist in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  Heather and I found them at a small store downtown called Paper Bear for something like $1 each.  They tasted like sugary chalk, but being the size of a tennis ball meant they lasted forever.  I would lick the rough surface until I got tired of the taste or until my tongue was practically bleeding from the texture, then stick it into a plastic bag to save until next time.  I cannot even tell you how repulsive I now find that method, but at the time it seemed to work just fine.  Plus those things lasted for weeks.  Talk about good bang for your buck.  

For some reason my mother has an affinity for old-fashioned candy.  Truly old-fashioned.  Things like dirt-colored Necco wafers and bright orange circus peanuts and Payday bars.  No one else in the family thought much of these strange confections, but since we weren’t allowed to eat any other candy we took what we could get.  I remember her once gleefully buying a payday bar for my sister and I to share.  She explained that the best way to enjoy these was to pry all the peanuts off the outside and then eat them first, leaving the softer, caramel-nougat center exposed.  I dutifully chewed my way through what seemed like thousands of soft, stale peanuts, only to discover I didn’t even like the center.  Of course I ate it anyway.  It was better than fruit leather.

Once I got to high school and had a car and small paycheck, I really branched out in the candy department.  All without my mother knowing, of course.  When you have a few bucks in the bank and the metabolism of a 16-year-old, the possibilities are endless.  I would walk down the candy aisle at the grocery store and be drawn to any fruit-flavored candy I could get my hands on.  I tried them all.  I became a jelly bean aficionado.  I sampled every kind of life savers there were.  I left a trail of gummi worm wrappers in my wake.  I didn’t much like chocolate but I’d take it as a last resort, if there wasn’t anything violently-colored or faux-fruit-flavored to snack on.

Now I’m pretty much exclusively in the chocolate camp, with a rather large exception for Jelly Belly Jelly Beans, which I don’t eat very often because they are stupidly expensive and stick to your teeth like nobody’s business.  Truth be told, though, I’ve been trying to steer clear of all candy for a while now in my effort to cut down on the amount of sugar I consume.  How’s that going, you ask?  Eh, some days are better than others, and some days are full of chocolate.  In my opinion, it’s a win-win situation.