MY SUGAR DADDY

Winning can be problematic.......

            When I was 10 years old, a local grocery store had a Sugar Daddy wrapper contest. Whoever turned in the most wrappers would win a prize. Sugar Daddys were half- inch thick slabs of dark molasses candy on sticks, like suckers. Unlike suckers, Sugar Daddys were not shatterable, and they were the consistency of asphalt. If you made the mistake of biting into one, your teeth got stuck and had to be worked free gingerly.

            I liked Sugar Daddys, and I liked Sugar Mommas and Sugar Babies, too. Sugar Mommas were softer and more pliable, and Sugar Babies were small chewy balls that looked like something found inside a diaper. But the prize was for Sugar Daddy wrappers, no substitutions allowed.

            A giant Sugar Daddy was the prize. This giant Sugar Daddy was about 15 inches long and two inches thick. While it was on display in the grocery store window, my friends and I would gaze at it longingly. Each morning we bought Sugar Daddies and doggedly sucked them into oblivion. My friends had the sense to get tired of this task, but I, with a stubbornness that has sometimes served me well in life, hung in there.

            Each morning I awoke with a mixture of dread and nausea, but I walked to the store, bought another Sugar Daddy, and slowly worked my way through it. I don’t know why it never occurred to me to keep the wrapper and throw the candy away.

            After I won the giant Sugar Daddy, my friends and I took turns carrying it reverently to my house, where we laid it on the kitchen table and studied it. A dilemma dawned on me. What could we do with a giant Sugar Daddy? I licked the end for a few minutes, then offered my friends a turn, but they declined. Someone suggested a knife, so I got out a butcher knife and tried to carve off little pieces. Then someone suggested a saw, and I got punished for bending the teeth of my father’s saw.

            For months the giant Sugar Daddy sat in our refrigerator. But I won it, I’d whine, whenever my mother threatened to throw it out. So it had to be worth something, didn’t it? How else would the world make sense?

            One day I laid it gently in the trashcan. Winning, I had discovered, was more complicated than I had previously understood, and bigger was not always better. I didn’t eat candy for a long time, and I never ate another Sugar Daddy.