One of my friends recently told me she doesn’t like
chocolate. Had she told me she’d just robbed a bank, I couldn’t have been more
shocked. I mean, she’s the first person I’ve ever known who doesn’t like
chocolate…or at least has admitted it.
I, on the other hand, have been addicted to chocolate ever
since I was about three years old and found my grandmother’s secret stash of
five lbs. of Fanny Farmer chocolates hidden in her living room. I ate my way
through at least a dozen chocolates before anyone noticed I was being unusually
quiet. And if I hadn’t squealed with delight when I bit into the one filled with peanut-butter
cream, I might have managed to get away with eating at least a dozen more.
On that day, my chocolate addiction was born. I had sampled
the forbidden fruit. I was hooked…and there was no turning back.
When I was kid, I was allowed chocolate only on special
occasions like Easter and Halloween. My mother did all of the grocery shopping and because she knew that no piece of chocolate
was safe around me, she bought it very sparingly, even though she also loved it.
And whenever she hid some chocolate for herself, she soon learned I could sniff
it out at 20 paces.
However, to my good fortune, growing up in Manchester meant no matter which street I chose for my daily walks to and from school, each one had a corner store on it…and chocolate bars. Also in my favor was the fact that many of the back alleys had discarded soda-pop bottles lying in them, especially on trash-collection day. Glass pop-bottles back then were worth cash...two cents for the small ones and five cents for the quart-sized.
So to a kid, finding a quart-sized discarded bottle was the equivalent of winning the lottery because chocolate bars, much larger than the ones nowadays, cost only a nickel.
Alas, my parents never suspected I secretly was feeding my craving for
chocolate just about every day…thanks to a neighborhood full of litterbugs.
After I got married and did all of the grocery shopping myself, I have to admit I went a bit wild. I even joined a wholesale shopping-club so I could buy "all things chocolate" in bulk. Soon, the kitchen cupboards were overflowing with chocolate Pop-Tarts, packages of hot-chocolate mix, chocolate-chip cookies, chocolate-fudge cake mixes, bags of M&Ms and stacks of chocolate bars.
My worst addiction, however, was Brach’s bridge mix. Every day, I ate an entire package of the decadent chocolate-covered raisins, peanuts, almonds, cashews, Brazil nuts, caramels and assorted creams. As I ate, I actually could hear the calories adding up (kind of like the sound of my house’s electric meter running), but I didn’t care. I needed my daily bridge-mix fix.
Finally, the day arrived when I realized I had to cut back. My belt was so tight, I was using the tip of a steak knife to poke extra holes in it to make it bigger. My teeth also were sprouting cavities so fast, it was as if they were breeding and on steroids. And my complexion went from peaches-and-cream to rocky road.
So I did cut back…way back.
It was nothing short of torture, especially since my husband wasn't exactly supportive. He was the type who could reach into a box of chocolates and
select only one, then close the box and not have another chocolate until the
next day. I, on the other hand, acted pretty much like a vacuum cleaner on
turbo-suction whenever I opened a box of chocolates. I don’t think I ever had a
box last longer than three hours.
But my worst temptation always arrived during this time of year. Halloween followed by Thanksgiving and Christmas, all grouped so closely together became more difficult than my chocolate-craving brain could endure. Handing out chocolate candy to trick-or-treaters without my usual “one for you, two for me” rule made me break out in a cold sweat. And not enjoying my annual ritual of biting the heads off a few chocolate Santas at Christmastime was sheer agony. What was I supposed to substitute instead? A granola Santa?
No, tradition dictated it had to be chocolate.
During
the initial phase of my self-imposed chocolate withdrawal, my husband, who
liked Three Musketeers bars, hid a box of them in the spare-room closet. Three
Musketeers bars never were my favorites, mainly because there was too much airy
nougat in them and not nearly enough chocolate to satisfy my addiction.
One night, however, after my husband had gone to bed and I
was sitting alone watching TV and desperately craving my previously daily sack of bridge mix, I heard voices calling out to me from the spare room.
“Saaaally! It’s us! The Three Musketeers…with our fluffy chocolate nougat,
drenched in creamy milk chocolate! We are in here, waiting for you! Come find us!”
I couldn’t bear it any longer. I dashed into the spare room
and tore into those candy bars. A pile of silver wrappers littered the floor as
I inhaled my husband’s precious stash. By the time I was through, the Three
Musketeers had been reduced to the Invisible Musketeers. And I was so
full of chocolate nougat, I felt as if someone had filled me with blown-in
insulation.
The next morning, I rolled out of bed (and I do mean
“rolled”) and headed straight to the store to buy a box of replacement Three
Musketeers bars before my husband could discover his were missing.
So with Halloween only a few days away now, I’m currently staring at the unopened box of Snickers bars sitting on my kitchen counter. They're specifically for trick-or-treaters, but a voice
keeps telling me to open the box and have “just one.” I have managed to resist thus
far, mainly because the price of candy has increased about 1,500 percent over
the past year.
Also,
I've learned from experience that when it comes to chocolate, “just one” does not
exist in my vocabulary. Within mere minutes of taking that first bite, the only thing left in that box would be a stray peanut crumb or two.
So I’m trying very hard to survive the few remaining days until Halloween without giving in to temptation.
Still,
if only two or three trick-or-treaters show up at my door this year, then the remaining
chocolate bars will have to be eaten
so they won’t go to waste.
And I’m pretty sure even Houdini, if he were still alive, wouldn’t be able to make them disappear any faster than I will.
Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science-fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.
