Growing Up Southern: October 1, 2017

As I’ve said before, a grown man in America is a miracle, considering the potentially devastating temptations presented to the young.

Consider the reason why I don’t eat marshmallows today despite once having loved them. Actually, love doesn’t rise to the proper level of description. I worshipped them as a boy. I loved them. I dreamt of them. I never got enough of them. Then one day I did.

It happened this way.

After the third grade, they allowed us a range of choices for lunch at school. One could bring lunch in a brown paper bag and enjoy it in a designated lunchroom, a choice generally reserved for the poor and the untrustworthy. One could take a quarter and walk four blocks north to the Pine Bluff High School cafeteria. One could walk the same distance due west on 15th Street until one reached a diner or, one block farther, to a corner drug store lunch bar. Those meeting two requirements qualified to dine. One had to have money and one had to be white. That’s all.

When not on probation and sentenced to the lunchroom, I opted for the western sites. This way, if I skipped a drink with a meal, I could purchase a five-cent bag of marshmallows at the corner drug store for desert.

Neither drugs for the dope fiend nor solitude for the poet had a greater pull than the thought of a bag of marshmallows had on me. Therein sprang the plot

You see, they didn’t just sell nickel bags at the drug store. They sold ten-cent bags as well. These were tempting, but the piece de resistance, the holy of holies, was a 25-cent bag of marshmallows the size of a small pillow. They perched on a tall display counter, screaming temptations like the sirens on the rocks of Scylla. As I concocted my plan, the image of those bags grew until I thought of little else except the day I would buy one and devour its entire contents—in one sitting.

But how? I only received a quarter a day for lunch, knotted in a lady’s handkerchief and placed in my left pocket each morning by my mother, who knew too well that to advance a boy of my age funds for more than a single day’s food was to telegraph an open invitation to Satan to make room for another soul.

I would have to operate within the perimeters set for me. I had to skip the normal meal. It was that simple. Besides, a meal of marshmallows had to be at least as healthy, probably more so, than a chili dog. Tastier too.

So, one fine fall day, about this time of year, I put my plan into action. I purchased my quarter-bag of marshmallows and set off to find a quiet spot, clutching my prize the way a wino might cradle a gallon of wine, and with as much anticipation.

I settled for a nearby alley, found a clean spot, sat against a wall, and proceeded to fulfilling the dream of a lifetime. I popped the first batch of the creamy white dream-things in, only barely chewing. The next few, I enjoyed the experience more slowly, the next slower still.

Then the power of mathematics interceded, for it was at that moment that I discovered a scientific fact that haunts me yet: the mathematical difference between having all the marshmallows one wants, and a nausea so intense that death would be a blessing and relief, is about three marshmallows.

In total, that represents about a third of a 25-cent bag of marshmallows purchased in 1951. The rest of that bag may yet rest in the base of a hollow tree where I left it. I don't know and I don't care. Further, the entire amount of marshmallows that I have eaten since that fateful day, in that fateful year, is—thanks to the Arabs who invented the concept of zero—none, nada, Keiner, aucun.

Some of life’s lessons prove easy. Some of life’s lessons prove difficult. Some of life’s lessons require what seems to be divide intervention. All contribute to the miracle of a young boy reaching manhood. If giving up marshmallows is the price one pays, so be it.

See what a quarter-bag costs today?
If inflation had only set in earlier.