Willie Wonka

Mr. & Mrs. Wonka were senior citizens by age, but had the youthful addiction to candy with which I am also afflicted.

It made me feel good about myself to see their unabashed love for candy.

As I rattled-off my sales pitch and exchanged laughs with these customers, I continued to observe more and more candy stashes all around their house. I fought through every urge I had to ask, “Do you mind if I...”

I didn’t go into every room in their house, but based on the room we were in, it looked as though you couldn’t move two feet in any direction without bumping into sugary delights.

In my house, I stick to the same basic indulgences: twizzlers and jelly beans.

The Wonka’s, though, were true sugar junkies. It looked like an old school candy store.

There were goldfish-bowl-sized glass containers filled with all different types of candies.

The first to catch my eye were the containers filled with old fashioned hard candy. This made sense to me. Old people had old people candy. Surely, this was the candy they grew up eating. I imagined the tales they would tell of the good ol’ days when a pound of candy was a nickel, or maybe even just a penny.

Next to catch my eye was the container filled with those small boxes of Dots.

I’m not ashamed to say this was surprising to me.

First, who buys Dots? This was the worst candy to get at Halloween. Dots should have been named Rocks. Wrapped pennies were better than Dots.

I am fairly certain the candy engineers at Dots have mastered the process of manufacturing stale candy. Not once have I opened a box of Dots and been able to actually chew a piece right from the start. Dots are working class candy in the sense that you have to give a solid blue collar effort to eat a box of this stuff.

I shook off my chills of disbelief at those Dots and let my eyes gaze upon greener pastures. There, next to Mrs. Wonka’s chair sat the promise land, a glass container filled with Tootsie Rolls.

Somewhere along the path of my sugar addiction I had a solid run of only buying Tootsie Rolls, and Mrs. Wonka sat next to a container filled with all different sized Tootsie Rolls from the tiniest to the King Size which sit inside their own little cardboard sleeve inside their plastic wrapper.

I was entranced. Luckily, I was able to mindlessly continue my presentation and make small talk while my mind drifted to memories of eating Tootsie Rolls and my path from Tootsie Rolls to Costco containers of Tootsie Roll pops which were the only way to improve on Tootsie Rolls and were exponentially more enjoyable then Blow Pops, neither of which the Wonka’s had, at least not in plain sight.

The containers of candy continued throughout the room. If there was a place to rest a picture frame, it was occupied by a canister of candy.

There were more sugary candies of course, but there were also containers with chocolates. The Wonka’s took in all types of candy for refuge without discrimination.

A sale come of this appointment, but I didn’t get the order.

It belonged to the clerk who sold me my bag of jellybeans on the drive back to my resting place for the night.