Day 29: Happiness is a Bulls Eye

A little mouthful of heaven. Chewy goodness that reminds one of childhood and penny candies. A smile in a wrapper. These are all phrases that describe the euphoria that washes over me when I have a bulls eye, or caramel creme as they are often called. As a child, I would save my pennies to buy these at the corner store.

During my teenage years, when I was a grocery store clerk, I have very fond memories of working Friday night or Saturday night and being a bit bored because the stocking was complete for the night and we had to break down the shelves. Now for the uninitiated breaking down means making all the shelves look pretty with plenty of product moved to the edge in a uniform fashion to fool the shopper into thinking there is more and to make sure they purchase the pretty labels. Anyway, during those nights a bag of bulls eyes were always found to be damaged. Since the market would send the damaged wrapper back, the inside product had to be eaten because it would have been thrown in the trash, which is just wasteful.

Looking back, I see the immorality of damaging so many bags of these little gooey goodnesses, but at the time, I did not understand what we grocery folk did was actually wrong. We rationalized that no one lost money on the deal because it was damaged the wrapper was being sent back.

Today, my son and I found a giant bag of these candies. I never buy them and felt propelled to recklessly place down the $1.99 that would liberate the bag from the store and into the trunk of my car. Before the bag could be put into the car, however, a few little bundles of joy were enthusiastically calling my name and my son's name. It would have been rude to ignore them, so of course we had to nibble on them.

I had a wretched morning. Kids pretending to be sick to the point that we were late getting out the door. A son who was yelling at everyone because he forgot his shoes in the car (he wore boots yesterday). Crabby little moi. And just plain aggravation. Luckily, the annoyance wore off and by the time I picked up my son up from pre-school, I was already well on the way to a better mood. The caramel cremes just ensured that the smile stayed on my lips for the rest of the afternoon. Oh, happy, happy, joy, joy.

This Rick Astley song sums up how I feel about caramel cremes! -and dates me.