Candy Bar Memories

I mentioned once before that I test software for a living, and when we do our final testing before a software release goes out our group gets some candy to keep our spirits up and keep us going. We usually get a few bags of the “fun size” bars (why those little ones are called fun size, I’m not sure; I’d have more fun eating a regular size candy bar) and sometimes some Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Without sounding like an old man with the “Back in my day…” speech, the candy today just doesn’t measure up. At least not in my mind.

I used to absolutely love Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. After not eating any for a long time, I had some two times. Both times I had them, they were poor excuses for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. The chocolate had the look and feel of plastic, although it did still taste like chocolate. I wonder if I held it in my hand, would it melt. Then what passes for peanut butter today is this dry, grainy stuff. Disappointing would be an understatement. I know they could make it like they used to because we bought some peanut butter cups from Trader Joe’s and there was a huge difference. No plastic on the outside and real peanut butter on the inside.

One of my other all-time favorites is Snickers bars. My complaints against them are that they are much smaller than they used to be, the chocolate on the outside is paper thin and the layer with peanuts and caramel is skimpy at best. As with the Reese’s, they are disappointing. I know, I know, things change. I know the argument that they’re cutting costs by doing what they’re doing. And I know that some people may even think, “Who cares? It’s just a stupid candy bar!” But think about it for a moment. Don’t we all have pleasant memories of eating candy bars? I do and here are two things I think of when I eat candy.

The first goes back to my childhood. At Halloween, we could take a little candy for our private stash and the rest went into a community bowl for the family and under the control of Mom. I would always take as many Snickers bars as I could. However, since they were limited I devised a way to make them last longer. I didn’t just take huge bites out of them and be done in a minute or two. Oh, no. Not me. I took my time and enjoyed them. As a matter of fact, I enjoyed every layer of them. How did I do that, you may ask. By eating the layers one at a time. (NOTE: The squeamish may skip the next paragraph. Parental discretion is advised.)

First I would eat all the chocolate off the sides, the ends and the bottom by carefully biting off small pieces and letting them melt in my mouth; I did not attempt to eat the chocolate off the top at this time. Next I would slowly eat the nougat center, being careful to not bite into the caramel and peanuts. By this point, which could be anywhere from 20 – 30 minutes later,  I was left with a piece of funky looking caramel, peanuts and the chocolate on top of that layer. It was like seeing a chicken ripped open and seeing the insides! You may not want to eat it after seeing that. Just knowing that it grossed out my sister was enough to make me want to continue eating my Snickers bar that way. However, it tasted great eating the individual parts and it lasted a lot longer than eating it the conventional way. Only after I was sure that all the nougat was gone did I slowly eat the final stage (and what I considered the best part!) – the caramel, peanuts and top layer of chocolate. Yum!

The second memory comes from when my wife and I lived in California. We lived there for about 18 months and were pretty much broke the whole time we were out there. My in-laws were horrified when they came out to visit us and saw how little food we had in the house and how thin we had gotten because of that. There were no extras. Well, one time we found an extra 50 cents and we went next door to the convenience store and bought a candy bar…to split…between the two of us. We ate that candy bar like we’d never had one before and we savored every small bite we took. We each ate our half slowly, enjoying the flavors rolling across our tongues, feeling like if that was the last candy bar we ever bought, we were going to enjoy it. And we did. Believe it or not, that is one of my happiest memories of our time in California. Forget the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, forget all the “beautiful people”, forget the sunny-almost-every-day lifestyle. That one day, sitting in our apartment, broke, my wife and I shared a candy bar and a memory that we will never forget. We may not have had much, but we had each other.

We all know that too much candy isn’t good for you, but here’s something a lot of us forget. Sometimes just a little candy, eaten slowly and with happiness, is just enough.

The Three Stooges

I recently saw the “The Three Stooges” movie, which I wanted to see from the time I saw the first trailer. It wasn’t an inspirational film, didn’t have any deep message and was fairly predictable. Yet, I thoroughly enjoyed it with three of my friends. We laughed so much at some points in the movie that we missed four or five lines of dialogue. However, it didn’t really matter, because this was, after all, The Three Stooges. No line of dialogue, no one scene was going to be the key to the movie. The key to the movie was the ridiculous slapstick comedy that went on between the three of them and sometimes others.

Here’s the one surprise of the movie. At the end of the movie the Farrelly brothers, who directed the movie, had a quick scene. They explained for the audience that the props used to smash someone over the head or in the face were just rubber or Styrofoam. They showed how they were used and how by putting in sound effects it seemed like they were real sledgehammers and crowbars. Seriously, you have to put that at the end of the movie? Why?

We watched the Stooges all the time when I was growing up. They were on every day after school on the new local UHF TV station (those of us around before cable know what UHF was) and we watched at least some of them, if not all of them, while having a snack. They were probably on TV on Saturday afternoons, too. Back then we would rather have spent our time outside doing stuff than sitting in front of the TV, but the Stooges were special. We made exceptions for them.

We could quote lines from the various episodes and do whole scenes. If we didn’t know them exactly, it really didn’t matter. We weren’t doing Shakespeare. For all the times we watched “The Three Stooges”, we never believed the hammers, pipes, crowbars and any other devices that were used to hit someone were real. In addition, when we imitated the Stooges and used real devices, we didn’t actually hit the other guy with them. No, we were smart enough to know that you could really hurt someone with them, so we faked hitting someone. I don’t know of anyone who ever did what the Stooges did, but with real tools, hammers, etc., and hurt someone else. Even though we were warned by teachers, parents and other assorted adults that “someone is going to get hurt”, no one that I know of was ever hurt in any way.

For all the so called violent shows we watched, we were not violent kids. We didn’t try to blow up somebody like in the Looney Tunes cartoons, or hit someone over the head like the Stooges, or shoot someone like they did in the cowboy movies that were on TV. Sure, we pretended to do all that stuff and even added in sound effects and a little drama as we slowly died. I just can’t imagine the directors of Looney Tunes taking a moment to tell us not to put a bomb under someone or to not put dynamite down someone’s pants, that it was all just for entertainment and not to try it at home. I believe that was something that parents did back then. I know my parents made sure we weren’t really beating on each other and knew that it was not acceptable to be violent toward someone else.

“The Three Stooges” hold many good memories for me, times of hanging out with my brothers and laughing until it hurt. The movie did the same for me and my friends. We laughed so much we had tears running down our faces and our stomachs hurt at times. Much to the annoyance of our families, we quoted the movie for a couple of weeks and laughed at nothing readily apparent when something reminded us of the movie. However, let it be known that none of us have hit anyone over the head with a sledgehammer or poked them in the eyes, even without a warning from the Farrelly brothers.

One Man's Trash Is Still Trash

I am appalled at the amount of trash I see laying around in the streets, on the sides of the roads, in parking lots, well, basically everywhere. It seems that just about every place I go I’m greeted by somebody’s carelessly discarded fast food bag, candy wrapper, soda can, losing scratch tickets, etc. I won’t even mention all the knuckleheads that flip cigarette butts out the window like the whole earth is their personal ash tray (oh, I guess I just did). 

A few weeks back, there was a local clean up for Earth Day and there was trash bag after trash bag on the side of the road filled with a year’s worth of refuse. There were also car tires, old television sets and radios, old chairs and worn out rugs. I even saw a car bumper on one street. I couldn’t believe all that trash had been picked up. The sad part about it is two days after it was all picked up and looking nice, some ignoramus dumped a small pile of junk in one of the spots that had just been cleaned. Seriously, the cleaned up area lasted all of two days. I guess they thought that it was someone else’s responsibility to clean up their mess.

What is wrong with people these days? I used to live on a semi-main road and almost every Saturday and Sunday morning I would have to clean up my front yard or the street in front of my house because there were Wendy’s, Taco Bell and Dunkin' Donuts bags, and quite a few times the remnants of a six pack from your favorite brewery (Drink Responsibly? Yeah, right). It wasn’t just my yard either. It was all up and down the street. There was a time we had put a non-working stove out front to be picked up by the local trash company and I noticed a car had stopped in front of it. I watched as they took off the dials for the burners, which I really didn’t care about since it was going to the dump. So the guy puts the dials in his car, takes out an empty wine bottle and a couple empty beer bottles, puts them on the old stove, jumps back in his car and starts to take off. I was ticked off big time and went tearing out of the house to try and get the license plate number or throw one of the empties through their back window, neither of which happened since they were too far away. I just couldn’t believe what I had just seen.

I’ve mentioned many times that we didn’t have much materially growing up, but one thing my parents taught us was to respect other people’s property. That meant that you didn’t throw your trash out the window of a car onto someone else’s lawn or in the street. Here’s a concept that doesn’t seem to be being taught anymore: bring your fast food trash home with you and put it in the trash when you get home or put it in the trash barrels that all fast food restaurants have outside their buildings after you eat and before you leave the parking lot. I know that’s a lot of work for some people and it appears they believe that it is below them to take care of trash, but it is their responsibility to clean up after themselves. Maybe it comes down to a lack of respect, I don’t know.

I don’t want to sound like an old man, but back in my day we didn’t throw trash out the car window. Littering was just not accepted. If my parents ever found out that I was throwing trash out the car window, I would not have had a car to drive for months. They just wouldn’t have stood for such stupidity and laziness. Plus, they probably would have made me go clean up my mess if it was still there just to teach me a lesson. My friends didn’t do it either, at least not that I can remember. This much I know: there wasn’t anywhere near as much trash in the street or in people’s yards.

So do your fast food takeout, have a soda or a bottle of water while you’re driving, even try your luck on a scratch ticket. Just have a little respect for the rest of us and don’t carelessly discard your trash out the car window. 

Don't Take a Lazy Man's Load

Another post in a series on Famous Family Sayings

One of the things I learned at an early age was that everyone had to pitch in and help. With so many people in one household, there was just too much for Mom and Dad to do everything themselves. I mentioned in this post that we all had chores to do in order to help out around the house and we all helped bring in items when any kind of shopping was done. We used to fill a shopping cart, and sometimes two, when grocery shopping was done.

Think about all the bags of food that would have to be brought into the house after Mom, Dad (and some of us kids) went to the store for the weekly shopping. There were a lot of bags to take care of. If we were in the middle of a game or an “important” TV show, we really didn’t want to have to go out and get all the stuff out of the car, bring it in to the house and help put it away, especially in the winter. We had different ways of dealing with this. Some of us went out right away, took as much as we could carry and brought it in; others took their time and took as little as possible as slowly as possible. We all did our best and tried to not drop anything.

But here’s the thing that used to confuse me. Dad would often say to us, “Don’t take a lazy man’s load.” I always tried to take as much as I could so I thought he was talking to the few who were taking just a couple of things at a time. I figured they were being lazy by just taking a couple of things when they could take more. However, as time went on, I noticed that Dad said “Don’t take a lazy man’s load” even when we all had as much as we could carry. I figured he must be talking to the older ones because us “little ones” were carrying big loads. At least we felt like we were.

It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I discovered what “Don’t take a lazy man’s load” really meant. It wasn’t that you took too little, but that you took too much. We would try to take as much as we could, probably too much, so that we didn’t have to go back and forth multiple times to get more. So even though we thought we were being smart and cutting down on the trips in and out, we were actually being lazy. All those years, when I figured Dad was talking to the others, he was actually talking to me.

It’s no wonder I used to hear that phrase a lot when I was helping carry things. He probably thought there was something wrong with me because as much as he told me to not take a lazy man’s load, I still did. What a knucklehead I was! I can see why he had that edge of aggravation when he told me. It’s too bad it took me almost ten years after Dad died to figure this out. Sorry, Dad.

After hearing “Don’t take a lazy man’s load” for all those years, you would think I would no longer do that, right? Well, unfortunately, I still do it today when we go shopping. I load up with as many bags as I can so I don’t have to go outside a bunch of times. The funny part of this is that I still hear Dad’s voice telling me to not take a lazy man’s load. I guess I still haven’t learned my lesson after all these years.