I have often written about my deep, abiding affection for confection.
I love sweets! I always have, and at 63, I probably always will.
When I was nine years old, we lived in Mableton, Ga. Just down the street was a Quicky Mart. It had a small gas station in front and sodas and candy inside. I had been with my dad as we went into the little store, and as usual, I begged for candy.
Sighing with exasperation, my dad finally told me I could choose something. Gleefully, I looked for the best sweet that would last longer than just a few seconds to wolf down. Then, I found it. It almost looked as if a halo of light was surrounding it. It was a baseball sized sweet tart.
It was lunch time, so after my sandwich, I started licking on my giant sweet tart. Running to the front yard, I climbed the crabapple tree, sat on a limb and continued licking.
Hours later, my sweet tart licked down to a golf ball size, I was called in for supper.
And what a supper! My mom had made my favorite meal…homemade spaghetti from scratch!
Joyfully, I took a huge bite of noodles swimming in flavorful tomato sauce. And that’s when it hit me…extreme AGONY!
I screamed my head off.
My mother jumped, and my sister looked at me like I grown a third eye.
“What’s wrong with you?” my mom asked.
“I don’t know…it burns!”
“What burns?”
“My thung!” I said slobbering and screeching with my tongue hanging out.
My dad started snickering, and we all turned his way. “She probably licked that sweet tart so much that she has no hide left on her tongue.”
He was right. And I had to sit there and watch everyone else eat that wonderful meal while my sore tongue hung out of my mouth.
I haven’t eaten a sweet tart in years, and I never will again.
Yet, my lessons weren’t quite yet learned. When I was 11 years old and living in Pennsylvania, across the street from us lived a family who became our friends…The Osgoods.
Mr. Osgood drove a truck and was pretty handy at it, too. But every so often, while attempting to drive on icy or snowy roads, a crate inside his big rig would shift, fall over and break open. The company would write off the loss, refusing to repack the goods to sell. So Mr. Osgood was allowed to keep whatever was damaged. One day he called me over. A crate of black licorice jelly beans had broken open and would I like some?
Of course, I wanted them.
I went back home that day with a brown paper grocery bag half full of black jelly beans. It weighed about five pounds.
Settling in to watch TV, I grabbed up my jelly beans and started on them. Several hours later, with only one-fourth of the bag of jelly beans left in the bag, I realized that I didn’t feel so well.
My unsettled and uneasy stomach grew worse and worse. Then it dawned on me that I had overdosed on licorice.
Now, black jelly beans really aren’t that attractive in the rainbow jelly bean world, but they look even worse coming back up. That ended my love affair of black jelly beans. I shudder to even look at them now.
Did I learn my lesson about overdoing the sweets? Nope.
But I did learn that my dad probably knew all along that I would lose the skin off my tongue, and my mom knew I would make myself sick on the jelly beans, but they didn’t say anything. Why? Because they knew I was too stubborn to listen and had to find out for myself.
Think of the pain I could have avoided if I hadn’t been a stubborn mule and had been willing to listen to good advice. Maybe we could save ourselves a lot of pain, agony and utter humiliation if we did listen to good advise.
