Candy Analysis

How do you eat your candy? If it is a lemon drop do you suck on it until it is the tiniest of disks and finally dissolves? Do you bite into it immediately and crunch the sugary sweet pieces?

Gum is particularly hard for me. I chew a piece for a few minutes then get the uncontrollable urge to swallow it and get another. Carrie will chew a piece of gum after lunch and walk through our door at 5:00 with the same piece of gum. How she does it I will never understand. What makes my little issue worse is that every time I swallow a piece of gum I get anxious remembering how they told us in grade school that it takes something along the lines of 100 years to digest. I imagine one corner of my stomach filled with half chewed gum waiting to disintegrate.

A friend and I were talking about candy canes this morning. Tis the season. I asked if she remembered sucking the end of the candy cane until it came to the sharpest of points. A point to be tested on ones arm or the arms and eyeballs of others. We talked about how your lips turned that sugary sticky pink. The wrapper that you so carefully left on the bottom half of the candy cane got all squishy and sticky. While you were finely tuning your point you would fiddle with the hook. This seems to be a universal practice among children as a few minutes later she and her co-worker had the same conversation.

Because of this conversation I think I will buy some candy canes to adorn the Christmas dinner table. I will be watching my eleven year old sister closely to see if she too carries on this childhood tradition. If she doesn’t I may have to eat one myself for old times sake.