my life of candy crime
kim and i met up for an afternoon out. we hit up wahaca for a late lunch and margaritas, then book shopping and a pilgrimage to the cybercandy store, where i spent nearly £20 on sweets from my childhood.
we weren’t allowed sweets or sodas in our house growing up, and as an early sugar addict, i had to get my fix. not coincidentally then, some of my earliest memories about candy involve stealing.
for example, the first time i tried stealing anything, i was probably about 7 and i had convinced my (younger) brother to stuff a roll of lifesavers in his underwear. we were caught at our bumbling attempts at subterfuge, and forced to spend a whole saturday composing letters of apology, then a further saturday presenting those letters to the stern store manager in person.
as a result, let’s just say we got very good at stealing, very quickly. we were, however, too scared to throw away the wrappers from our purloined contraband, so we stuffed all the incriminating evidence into my kid sister’s toy desk. i’m not sure whatever happened to those wrappers, or what kind of rap my sister ended up taking – being 5 years younger and a whole lot smaller, she was often easily “persuaded” to confess.
later, i became adept at filching money from my mother’s purse – just a few cents here or there. i would stop off at droughan’s drugstore – a true five and dime relic around the corner from school – and buy loose penny candies and lucky rabbits’ feet keychains in rainbow colours. of course, i couldn’t bring the rabbits’ feet home without arousing suspicion, so i left them at my desk at school, festooned around the back of my chair. but at the end of the school year when we had to clean out our desks, what could i do? i brought them home and planted them in my brother’s belongings. when my mother found them, she believed she’d finally caught my brother red-handed…and given the amount of trouble my brother was usually in, it wasn’t such a stretch of the imagination. once again, someone else took the blame for my illicit activities.
because sweets were so restricted in our house, there were no sugary sodas kept in the pantry. instead, there was always a two litre of my mother’s diet tab. back then it was flavoured with saccharine, leaving a bitter aftertaste in the mouth – but i didn’t care. i would slyly steal big slugs of it, slowly loosening the cap to avoid the telltale hiss. when the levels dipped too low, i’d have to top up the bottle with a little water. my mother must have known… but i never got caught.
and so standing in the middle of the candy shop, gleefully filling my bucket with nostalgic goodies, i can only conclude that my parents’ experiment with raising a sugar-free child failed spectacularly, and turned me into a light-fingered thief along the way.
probably not the outcome they intended.
new edition – candy girl
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Comment by Diana Banana
21.01.2008 @ 02:55 am
neccos yuck, mary janes yuck, Tab, YUCK! Charleston Chew…DELICIOUS! Mmm…I’m totally going to go buy a charleston chew and put it in the freezer…YUM!
Comment by Charlotte
21.01.2008 @ 05:23 am
From one sugar addict to another … that pile looks sorely tempting. We were allowed sweets on Saturdays, which meant that both my brother and I become OBSESSED with sweets and still both have a dangerously sweet tooth. My husband was raised with a bowl of sweets always available on a side-table and sweets leave him cold.
So, I am experimenting with allowing my kids a few sweets everyday after their main meal. I’m hoping sweets will be part of their lives and not something to thrill over.
(In case the food police pop by, let me also say that my kids eat a wide variety of healthy foods, including five daily fruits and vegetables.)
Comment by Jen
21.01.2008 @ 07:20 am
@diana – mmmm frozen charleston chews are the best!
@charlotte – sounds like a sensible plan to me! you certainly don’t want your kids growing up like i did!
Comment by vanessa
22.01.2008 @ 01:11 am
you know me- I pretty much hate most candy. I was thinking today too how after school each day my grandma would get me big wheels for an after school snack. Twinkies. Ho Ho’s. I loved that shit. I loved it way into adult hood. I think I had my last twinkie in my 20’s. Hmmm actually I think I had my last twinkie pregnant with G
. And it amazed me how much junk food I was sort of allowed. but then again, later on, we didn’t “carry’ that stuff on a daily basis. I had to go out and buy it for myself. I’d eat a box of cookies all at once. And then eat well for a while. My dad always talked of sugar being evil in a joking way and it was something we enjoyed but it was kind of like French Teens drinking wine- it wasn’t contraband either. So I’m pretty good and regulating my sugar ( sort of!!! I require a lot of it for coffee etc). I have to remember this when I try to limit G’s sugar. Not to make it a big deal. It’s hard though, b/c ppl love to push sugar on little kids. And she does act like an asshole when sugared up.
long ramble to say nice post. Nice song.
Comment by Tabitha
22.01.2008 @ 03:17 am
Spoken like a true sugar addict! On the off chance of recieving money, I wouldn’t go to that coveted stainless steel candy rack that seemed to tower over a young child. Instead, I would head to the front counter and proceed to blow all loose change and common sense on the little mini sugary stuff. Mary Janes, Squirrel Nuts, Bazooka, Mini Fun Dips, fireballs, jawbreakers.
You get the idea! I always seemed to make out with more that way.
If my mother had any sense, she would have offered me, once in awhile, a morsel of that sweet elixir I craved so much. Had she done this, I might have actually spent some of my late 20’s away from the dentist chair from all the damage I did just years earlier “making” up for so much lost time.
Comment by Jen
22.01.2008 @ 06:48 am
“Mary Janes, Squirrel Nuts, Bazooka, Mini Fun Dips, fireballs, jawbreakers.”
yup – that’s my preferred poison as well. and i too, have spent inordinate amounts of time in the dentist’s chair!!