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I never imagined bringing home chocolate could get me in trouble with my wife. But then again, there are a lot of things I’ve never imagined.
I’m not telling any tales out of school when I say Gayle has a certain weakness for chocolate. In fact, saying that is a bit like saying the rest of us have a certain weakness for oxygen. It’s no stretch of the imagination to claim that were my wife the first married woman elected pope, Milton Hershey would be in line to be canonized the first Mennonite saint.
Nonetheless, there were few blessings in store after I unloaded the trunk Saturday afternoon.
And to think none of it would have happened had a couple of whisker thin bits of wire not come undone from their mountings, causing a couple of itty-bitty twinkly lights to fail to twinkle, and in so failing, simultaneously each darken 99 others. Being as I was doing what I do best on a Saturday nothing I was dispatched by my industriously decorating spouse to obtain replacements.
In normal times, sending me to the store is a fairly risk-free venture. Shopping save for things I can eat or read is a chore to be done with. I go; I find; I purchase; I leave. Sending me to the Christmas Trimmery should have been a mission fraught with less temptation than dispatching George W. Bush to a bookstore.
And at the outset, that is what it appeared to be. With all appropriate dispatch I located the twinkly lights, and in a twinkle had four strings of 100 two as assigned and two for backup, just in case in the cart and pointed toward the checkers. But the nearest lines were long and the aisle congested. I decided to double back, do an end run and make my exit posthaste.
Reversing course, I slipped past the light sets and yard decor, skirted Toyland through housewares, footwear and an aisle stacked with tractor mufflers and veterinary supplies only to be blocked by a woman with a full cart and broad beam snatching almond bark from an overloaded shelf.
I figited, impatient. oblivious, she picked out some peanut brittle and started sorting through the assorted gumdrops.
I looked at my all but empty cart then at the sacks of ribbon candy and bridge mix weighing down hers and ... well ...
I remember how puzzled I was as a child, when a dime was big money and the whole world belonged to somebody else and my role in it was to do what I was told, why the grownups who ran the place didn’t do the fun stuff they clearly could if they only wanted to ... stuff like staying up until after the TV signed off or buying all the candy they wanted just because they wanted to.
Well, TV is on 24 hours a day these days, but there I was, an over-aged kid in a candy store, debit card in my wallet with a fresh paycheck to back it up.
Not only that, I’d missed lunch ...
There were bags of mini-Snickers in red and green wrappers, plain and peanut M&Ms all in holiday colors. I found Hershey’s Kisses St. Milton’s 101-year-old innovation that really put Hershey, Pennsylvania, on the map but in four varieties done up special for the season. There were peanut butter cups in the shape of festive holiday bells competing with a veritable carillon constructed of Nestle Crunch. And that’s to say nothing of the peanut caramel clusters, chocolate raisins, everybody’s favorite holiday health food, malted milk balls and as a sweet reminder of the blessed night of the nativity chocolate stars.
I bought them all. Then tossed in peanut brittle, gumdrop spearmint leaves, jelly-filled raspberry hard candy, filled Christmas peanut candy, a couple pounds of mixed nuts and a bag of licorice.
On my way to the checkout I grabbed a trio of three-pronged cheater plugs I’d need to connect lights and extension cords.
I drove home in the grip of an insulin contact high. Humming the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” I eased the first two bags onto the kitchen table.
In fairness to her reputation and good name in the faculty room, it wasn’t the chocolate that dismayed my life’s partner. “Where,” she wanted to know, waggling a bag of Kisses in a distinctly unprovocative manner, “am I going to put all of this?”
“Aaaah ... candy dish ... several candy dishes.”
Candy dish pans would have been a more appropriate, and just as well received, suggestion.
I was, momentarily, quite concerned. But when I spotted her nibbling a caramel peanut cluster, I figured I’d be forgiven.
Someday.
Even so ... it sure was fun.
For Jerome’s comments on this, that and something else check out “Up on the wrong side of the bed” at www.rivervalleyblogs.com/jerome or go to www.winonadailynews.com.
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