Tag Archive for Portkey

Chuckles, the Candy: A Tribute

It’s remarkable that we live in a world where we can still purchase Chuckles candy. After everything’s gone so wrong, how is it that we’ve got this one thing right? Chuckles is like a food item left to us from an alien world. A distant galaxy. And certainly a different time. 

Think of the things that didn’t exist when Chuckles first hit the scene in 1921. This colorful, sugar-sprinkled “jellied candy” arrived before smartphones and the internet, before alarm clocks and avocado toast, before scotch tape and sliced bread, before the chocolate chip cookie and TV dinners, before the cheeseburger and chicken nuggets, before the walkie talkie and the electric guitar, before the frisbee and jukebox, before everything bagels and string cheese, before M & Ms and Gobstoppers, before Sour Patch Kids and the Charleston Chew, the Milky Way and Hershey’s Kisses, Milk Duds and Heath Bars and Tootsie Roll Pops and Red Hots, before the microwave and the atomic bomb.

Today we can walk into a convenience store and find that tidy rectangular rainbow of jellied confectionary in red, yellow, black, orange, and green. The mighty Chuckles, perfectly packaged in thin cardboard and a cellophane wrapper. Even the typeface is exactly right with those two cockeyed eyeballs over the u. 

Chuckles began more than one hundred years ago when a man named Fred Amend introduced his latest edible invention to the unsuspecting world. Amend’s genius? He figured out how to make jellied candies that didn’t stick together. Amend threw together a few wholesome ingredients: corn syrup, sugar, cornstarch, modified food starch, natural and artificial flavors, red 40, caramel color, yellow 6, blue 1, and yellow 5 and . . . presto!

These days, now a grown man, I’m like that bee buzzing by the flowers, seeking nectar, thinking: sugar, sugar, sugar. I blame my father for my sweet tooth, for he did the food shopping in our family. On Saturdays, Dad ventured out alone and performed the massive, weekly food shop at Bohacks or the A & P for a family of nine ravenous mouths. When Dad pulled up to the house in a station wagon crowded with groceries, it was expected that all available children would file out to help, passing along the behemoth brown bags like a fire brigade.

It was a ton of food. And if we are in fact what we ate, here’s a snapshop of me: cans of vegetables, peas and corn and carrots. TV dinners. Campbell’s soup. Juice and six-packs of soda (we kept it warm under the sink) and Maraschino cherries for cocktails. Pop-tarts and big boxes of sugary cereals (Quisp was my childhood favorite) and “family-sized” packages of Reese’s Peanut Cups and a bag or two of those pink wintergreen mints he loved so much. Dad was a devout Entenmann’s man, of course, so there would be coffee cake and raspberry danish and whatever else struck his fancy. Open to inspiration while wandering the aisles, Dad was prone to coming home with surprises. 

What chance did I, just a child, have in the face of all that goodness? I caught the buzz even then: sugar, sugar, sugar. 

One day we’ll look up and Chuckles will be gone the way of the dodo, destined to extinction, surpassed by Gummy Worms and Life Savers Gummies or Skittles or what have you. But for now, count your blessings. And be like me: once a year, or once every few years, pick up a sleeve of Chuckles at the neighborhood convenience store. It’s like tasting the Olden Days. A magical portkey that transports us through time to a simpler era.

Sugar, sugar, sugar.

 

 

 

 

Shucking Corn: Memory’s Golden Haze

“There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow
The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye
And it looks like it’s climbing clear up to the sky”

Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’

by Oscar Hammerstein II, Richard Rodgers


We all have them, the sights and sounds that trigger memories, connect us to our past. The old times. Our long gone days.

For some, it might be the sight of an old red wagon, the bells of an ice cream truck a block away, or the aroma of fresh, baked bread. We see it, hear it, smell it and are magically moved, transported, to another time, another place. Our former lives, the past.

J.K. Rowling plays with the idea of the transporting object in the fourth book of the Harry Potter series, The Goblet of Fire, when she introduces the concept of the portkey. It is an object that, once touched, holds the power to warp space, shifting a body to another place — a portal not unlike Proust’s light, spongey madeleine cakes. In the case of Proust, the experience takes you to another time. One sniff carries you away.

I experience a reliable portkey whenever I shuck an ear of corn, an act which always evokes memories. The stripping away of outer leaves is similar, in affect, to peeling back layers of time. I instantly (and involuntarily) recall being a boy again — standing barefoot at the side of my old red house on 1720 Adelphi Road, that narrow strip of property just outside our kitchen door abutting the Esteps’ place, literally our next door neighbors. I am handed a brown grocery bag and pushed out the door, tasked with the chore of shucking the corn.

There are seven children in our family and this is a job that even the youngest child can’t screw up too badly, though I don’t recall ever having a perfectionist’s patience while pulling away each fine strand of corn silk. I loved tearing away the rugged green leaves, layer by layer, revealing the bright kernels of sweet summer corn. So delicious and suddenly in season, piping hot on our kitchen table in a great steaming bowl, wrapped in a kitchen towel to keep warm.

I still love that job today — shucking the corn — and always volunteer. I even love the word itself: shuck. Aw, shucks. That wonderful “uck” sound: truck and cluck and who knows what else. It’s as fun to say as it is to do. Each time I’m brought to a simpler moment from the past, a childhood ideal. Our family, bustling and busy, together. A time before any of the hard stuff ever happened.

We even had a dinner bell my mother would let me ring. And I’d shout: “Barbara! Neal! John, Al, Billy, Jean! Dinner’s ready!”

And then we look up and the leaves have turned, we blink and they have fallen, and soon we’re wearing sweaters and tramping off in heavy boots. The harvest season is over. The corn spent, the stalks cut, the fields brown and barren. But the golden memory persists.

Some folks talk with disdain about living in the past, as if it were a bad thing. We’re told that we need to focus on the here and now, the life that’s lived in front of our senses. And I suppose they’re right about that. But the older I get, the more past I gather. There are people I love who exist only in my past, exclusively in that long gone time: two brothers, Neal and John, a father, some absent friends. I visit with them only in memory.

Richard Ford, one of my favorite writers, has his most well-known character, Frank Bascombe, make a casual comment about dementia. Frank opines that it’s probably not as bad as it’s cracked up to be. Perhaps not for the circle of loved ones, but for the dementia-sufferer herself. Living in that white-blue haze, staring off at the television screen, watching something or some time, misty and uncertain. The chair my mother sits in becomes a portkey and the crumbling architecture of her mind lifts off, roams and wheels like seagulls above the surf. And there in the lambent light steps forward a flickering image, her youngest child struggling with a heavy brown bag filled with corn, tasked with shucking, peeling away the outer leaves and silky tassel to reveal, once again, those yellow rows of tasty kernels, a bright golden haze on the meadow.