Rockets - Yeah!

 

Now that Hallowe’en is a thing again – okay, maybe it never stopped, but during two years of COVID restrictions, it seems like everything did – the age-old debate is back: what’s the best Hallowe’en candy?

Tiny chocolate bars don’t count. First, they’re a given favourite. The only argument is which one is the best. Mars bars were tops for a while, then Crunchies took the prize, now I’m a huge (or would be, if I ate every one I see) Aero fan. Second, tiny chocolate bars are ubiquitous, a fact of life and school lunches in this era of dwindling seasonal treats. By “dwindling”, I mean much of what was once only available at select times of the year is now available all year, so it’s hard to get excited about a clutch of little chocolate bars when whole boxes of the darned things are in stores 24/7. The manufacturers try to make them special by issuing scary shapes in spooky wrappers, but I doubt the kids are fooled either.

I digress. Sort of. Back to the best of the Hallowe’en treat bag:

Stick gum? No, thanks.

Chiclets? Better than stick, but still, no thanks.

Bubble gum? Geez, how many kinds of gum are there, anyway?

Lollipops? Meh. The green ones are okay, but ...

Molasses kisses? A taste I neither appreciated nor acquired until adulthood. Now I love them, dark sticky ones and whipped chewy airy ones alike. If only they were available all year.

Apples? Straight to compost.

Skittles, Starbursts and Sour Patch Kids didn’t exist when I was trick or treating, nor did gummies of any ilk. I like gummy Life Savers now, but am lukewarm to the others.

Nope, my second favourite treat as a Hallowe’en kid was a roll of Rockets. Hands down, the best candy in the bag. Pure sugar with no real flavour, they are little buttons of pure sweet/tart delight – very much a mini-version of the SweetTarts I also loved in childhood. I could get SweetTarts at the corner store year-round, but Rockets were strictly a Hallowe’en thing. I hoarded them like a miser, they were off-limits in trades unless I had a friend who disliked them, in which case I’d happily surrender whatever my buddy wanted in return. If I ate them one at a time, I could make a roll of Rockets last far longer than a little box of Smarties.

A strange aside: I hear Rockets are called Smarties in the States. Their version of Canadian Smarties must be the sub-standard M&Ms ... but that’s a debate for another time.

Nowadays Rockets, like tiny chocolate bars, are available all year – if you know where to get ’em. And I do ... or Ter does, and so a constant supply resides in our kitchen pantry. I have a stash in my desk drawer at the office, too, and it’s not unusual to hear the telltale wrapper crinkling at some time between eleven and one on any given day, be it a weekday or a weekend, week in, week out, month in, month out, all blessed year. My favourite Hallowe’en candy is a seasonal treat no more.

I can’t decide if I’m happy about that, or a little sad.

Crap O’Clock

I am slumped in my comfy chair, still in my jammies with a hot Magic Bag softening my stiff neck and shoulders. A bleary-eyed Ter is nursing the day’s first cup of tea from her corner of the loveseat. Neither of us has the energy for small talk. A mournful wail suddenly wafts up from the lawn beneath our window, wending its way into our living room—it’s the three-year-old downstairs, voicing his displeasure at being dressed and out the door to daycare before seven a.m. on a weekday.

“Suck it up, junior,” I say, bluntly. “Life is hard so you’d better get used to it.”

Cut me some slack, okay? This is the same kid who wakes me from a sound sleep at this same ungodly hour on a Sunday by galloping gaily up and down the hall beneath our suite. Instead of sympathizing, I take a perverse pleasure in him being hauled out the door against his will two days a week when I have to get up and go to work for five. He thinks he’s hard done by now? Wait until he starts school, heh heh.

Yup, it’s a hard life all right. I am not nor ever have been a morning person. I have learned to appreciate the beauty of a sunrise over the ocean or the tranquil solitude of a pre-breakfast flânerie, but overall, I’d rather stay up late than get up early. And I can sympathize with Junior Jinx (as Ter calls him) to some degree: I became “anti-morning” when I started school myself. It’s not that I disliked school (much). I’m generally quite happy when I get to the office, too. It’s the getting up at crap o’clock to go somewhere I’d rather not go that well and truly bites.

I don’t know how my mother did it. She was always the first one up, summer or winter, rain or shine, and breakfast was usually on the hob before she knocked on my door with a cheery, “Wakey, wakey!” or—after my bones kicked in—an even brighter, “Pill time!” Those were bleak mornings for sure. I can’t imagine she liked them any better than I did, but I never saw it.

During a recent work tea with Treena, she reminisced fondly about the idyllic days of childhood. “Do you remember waking up every day, full of excitement and eager to see what adventure awaited?” she asked, wistfully.

I just stared at her, wondering what that must have been like. It seems every morning of my life is met with the question of whether I can do it. Whether I can get up and get going. It was particularly grim when I was younger, but I’ve hated being woken up forever. Sure, I can wake up happy on a weekend, but who doesn’t? It’s a weekend, for Pete’s sake!

Which reminds me: I have to reset the alarm before I go to bed tonight.

Crap.

I Got the Music in Me

They say that the printing press was the most important invention in history. If this is so, then the advent of recorded music must be a close second.

Ter and I met in 1982. Our mutual musical history began then, with Duran Duran, Def Leppard, Tears For Fears, Michael Jackson, and a host of others. When we tune into the 80s music channel, almost every song conjures a memory that starts with one of us saying, “Do you remember …?” We laugh and reminisce and wonder whatever became of So-and-So when it seemed at the time that we would always be in touch with our friends. Good times, bad times, hard times, doesn’t matter which. Pick a song and we are transported instantly into our shared past.

Tune into the 70s channel, however, and we have discovered buried treasure. Music was less homogenized back then. Folk rubbed with rock, disco dropped in, and pop was often schlock, but everything got airtime because radio had yet to become “formatted.” It was fun, even though I was battling my bones and Ter was in her turbulent teens during most of the decade. We didn’t know each other then. One had no idea that the other existed, in fact, or that the scene was being set for the destiny point when our paths would cross and the adventure would begin.

We hit the 70s channel one night, just because. Oh, we laughed. We laughed … and then the memories surfaced. Not mutual ones, of course, but the fossilized ones unearthed by songs we heard while growing up in our separate worlds. “These Eyes” is her favourite Guess Who tune. “No Time” is mine—but she and I both remember the pink and orange label on the old 45, even if neither of us could name the company that owned it. The 70s channel inspired a different question from the 80s. Instead of “Do you remember?”, one of us asked, “Where were you?” and wow, we had a blast bringing each other up to speed.

I generally stream my silly jazz station at work. With thirty channels to choose from, there’s always something to fit my mood. My membership, however, also covers jazzradio.com’s sister station, radiotunes.com, which features a gazillion channels spanning pretty much every genre in existence. Last Friday, for the heck of it, I picked the Oldies, and O-M-G, everything they played dated from my elementary school years or earlier! It was the perfect playlist to file by!

So, whether at work, at home, or somewhere in between, music has proven critical to my existence. It fires up my imagination and grounds me at the same time. Of course I appreciate the value of the printing press—what writer wouldn’t?—but if I had to choose between TV and my stereo …

The Memory Tree

A friend once referred to our Christmas tree as “a f***ing soap opera tree”. He spoke in awe and with some envy, as by then our tree had evolved from a fake Scotch pine with bottle-brush branches (say that three times fast) to a stately fake blue spruce laden with ornaments fit for the set of a daytime drama. Our collection grew in earnest after 1991, when Ter brought home two new ornaments and another holiday tradition was born.

The tradition has fallen by the wayside of late, mostly because the tree ain’t getting any bigger and the ornaments were getting out of hand, but I’m okay with that. I look fondly on every decoration because, for most of them, a memory is attached.

Like the Heineken beer mat from the pub where some work friends and I had Christmas drinks. Or the silly snowmen that came in east coast Christmas packages from Nicole. Jules’ bells and jingle bells. A blown glass angel from my wee sister and a sparkly handmade pine cone from a good friend. We have a ton of Tiggers, a couple Captains (Jack Sparrow and James T Kirk), some Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeers and a collection of oldies culled from our family trees when we were kids. The unicorn from a craft fair; the shiny grapes Ter loved as a child; the sun, the moon and lots of stars just because we like them. I look at our tree and see more than a set designer’s finest hour. I look at our tree and see history. Good times. Loved ones. I don’t recall what ornament came in which year anymore, but it doesn’t matter. The tree connects me to my past and gives me a memory for the future. Forward, backward or sitting in the moment, no matter which way I look, the view is a pretty one.