Double Flee A

While we were over in Wisconsin dropping off wedding clothes for JV's friends, we stopped at her friend Mandy and Tana's parents' house in Mondovi. Randy (the dad) had just found their neighbor and friend of 30 years dead in his house earlier that day and so the mood was low. A drawn-out necessarily subdued emotional reaction is what I will blame for not having mentioned earlier that Randy has a ton of candy, one kind of which is my absolute favorite in the world, and he gave me the whole bag.

The greatest candy made by humans is the Atkinson's Chick-O-Stick. It is peanut buttery and coconutty, kind of like the inside of a butterfinger but much better. I saw some last summer at Mabel's fabric store or something like that; I thought they didn't make them any more. I bought two. I ate one and gave the other to muddy, with whom JV and I went out that evening. Anyway, these ones that Randy had were bite-size Chick-O-Sticks. You will have to try to imagine my shock and delight, but to make it easier for you, imagine Scott Peterson, instead of the death sentence, received Catalina. But it's hard to jump up and down when somebody's having a bad day like that.

When I was a kid and my mother read us bedtime stories, one of those was the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. There were seven books, I seem to recall. My attention span wouldn't allow me to maintain interest in the whose series, not even the whole first book, but I do remember a couple of things.
1) There's a land where it's always cold and a lion named Aslan that the evil witch is scared of.
2) The kids in the book eat a thing called "Turkish delight" which sounded like about the best thing a person could ever eat, even though it was never clear exactly what that was. At this point in my life, having tried a fair amount of the world's treats, I think if Turkish delight had been just like a Chick-O-Stick, the story, and they way we felt about this mystery confection, would have made perfect sense, and be none the less magical.

Thanks, Randy, and thanks Atkinson's, for the best damn candy there is.

posted by dale @ 8:01 PM