Leftover Candy

KIT KAT

“I don’t even like candy that much”, I thought to myself as I ripped open another lipstick-red candy wrapper with my front teeth and popped the Kit Kat bar into my mouth. Glancing down at the mound of ripped red wrappings scattered on top of the morning’s coffee grounds and cracked eggshells in the trash, I promised myself aloud, “This is my last one!”

It was ten a.m.

The day stretched out in front of me with to-do lists, the laundry and this damn leftover Halloween candy. I had to ‘take hold’ somehow. That’s what my inner authoritarian is always telling me when it senses that I am going lax on some important front of life or getting too soft around the edges. “Take hold!”

The phrase, ‘take hold’, comes from one of my favorite movies, War & Peace (the 1956 version), featuring Herbert Lom as Napolean. Lom was to become well-known to American audiences in the comedic role of Inspector Dreyfus in the Pink Panther movies, acting opposite, his nemesis, Peter Sellers as the hapless Inspector Clousseau. Lom’s Napolean is brilliant.

When Lom and his army of 100,000 troops finally reach Moscow to seize official control of the much-prized city, the Third Rome, as it was sometimes called, they find the city abandoned, on fire and empty of provisions for his men, horses and livestock. It was mid-September and the weather was turning cold. With the stench of smoke permeating all quarters in the city, Lom angrily admonishes his generals to ‘take hold’, put out the fires, arrest the looters and restore order. Winter was approaching along with the specter of starvation.

“Gentlemen! Take hold!”, he bellowed with false bravado. The war was lost.

“Indeed,” I thought and reached for another Kit Kat.

HERSHEY’S MILK CHOCOLATE MINI with almonds

With only a half hour for lunch we had to move fast, race over to the locker room to strip off our fish-slimed rain gear and, then, hustle down to the grocery store to grab some food. Returning to the cannery dock we would have about ten minutes total to eat our lunch and smoke half a cigarette before donning our rain gear again and returning to the sliming line.

Everything smelled like rotten fish including us.

I ate exactly the same thing for lunch every day, a twelve ounce can of V8 juice, a bag of beef jerky and a Hershey’s milk chocolate bar with almonds.

In the summer of 1973 a salmon cannery worked something like this: the salmon were fed through a machine that cut off of the head and the tail, slit the stomach open and removed the guts from inside of the opened fish carcass. Next, the gutted salmon were spilled onto turning stainless steel carousels surrounded by slimers such as myself, who picked up each fish, opened up the body and scraped whatever blood, guts and slime remain attached to the spine before the fish was canned and cooked.

Sometimes when a new load of fish was pushing the acceptable-level-of-freshness standard, the entire processing plant would fill with an awful stench. More often than not the load was processed in spite of the stink. At the sliming table we could actually pick up a fish body by its neck-end with the tail-end pointed upwards and watch the mushy flesh slide off of the spine. Creepy. Supposedly, the flesh firmed up in the can when cooked.

To this day, I still love a Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar with almonds and I never eat canned salmon.

SNICKERS

In 1911 Franklin Clarence Mars started the Mars Candy Factory in Tacoma, Washington with his second wife, Ethel Veronica. The business failed and Frank and Ethel returned to his home state of Minnesota and created the Mar-O-Bar Company, introducing the Milky Way bar in 1923.

As a child, Franklin had contracted a mild case of polio. The story goes that his mother, Alva, taught him how to hand-dip chocolate candy as a way of entertaining her boy during his illness. He and his heirs built a candy empire worth an estimated $126 billion.

The Snickers bar was created in 1930 named after a favorite horse belonging to the Mars family.

EPILOGUE

Americans will spend $9 billion on Halloween this year including $480 million for pet costumes.

600 million pounds of candy is sold on Halloween.

On average a Trick-or-Treater will consume 7000 calories on Halloween.

It is illegal to dress up as a priest for Halloween in the state of Alabama.

I really don’t like candy all that much.