For someone who professes not to be a great fan of sweets, I certainly devote a lot of thought to chocolate bars. Possibly it has to do with the act of procuring a chocolate bar, which provides the sort of minor interruption of routine that is so conducive to private reflection. If it happens that I have spent the majority of a day in my house (and it bodes that I may spend the remaining hours there as well), I am more likely to step out for the sole purpose of acquiring a chocolate bar than any other solitary item. It really does feel like giving oneself a break. The task has the pleasing brevity and single-mindedness such that it does not make one feel that one has committed to an errand, but does satisfy the urge to see the sky and feel the air on one’s skin, without the bother and pageantry of sitting about in the grass, becoming damp and scratchy, as is so often the case. (Why is it so difficult to read in the park? Must one always have a blanket? Annoying.) To the dep and back is not much time for serious reflection, but I often feel in those passages a calm and clarity that usually attends the contemplation of a serene nature, or at least less-cluttered vistas than that of the dilapidated, elevated highway that serves as the northern horizon of my neighbourhood.
I should mention that the chocolate bar, as the object of such outings, has a bit of its own aura, for in my years of veganism, the casual chocolate bar was effectively removed from my terrain of possibilities. It was with something of a shock of familiarity that I first realized, in some early summer of my post-veganism, that I was completely free to take a walk down the street and just buy a chocolate bar, at any old store, pretty much whenever I wanted. I don’t know that it is easy to convey the specialness of this, but it is something that retains even now the slight thrill of novelty. There is something to it of an entry back into the normal, the capacity to participate in the mundane and commonplace of society, like cutting one’s hair or voting or staying in a hotel, that punks and other sundry weirdos go through much of their life excluded and excluding themselves from. It always feels like an achievement, like one has just barely pulled one over on the world.
Today, on such an amble, I got to wondering about how effectively chocolate bars could serve as links to the past. Certainly, all foods carry some potential for time travel, which has been roundly exploited in literature both high and low, but the heavily processed quality of chocolate bars (and other candies, of course) allows for the greater likelihood that the constitution and preparation of a chocolate bar remains unchanged for five, ten, even twenty years. Admittedly, what with fluctuating prices of cocoa, corn, cane, and nougat, changing dietary trends, and an industry fixation on novelty, such consistency is by no means guaranteed. But the possibility suggests itself. This was, in fact, about as far as I got in my ruminations over the block and a half between the dep and my house, spurred by my puzzlement as to whether the Twix I was eating, once my favourite chocolate bar (I don’t recall over how many years, but it’s one of those shelved-away biographical factoids that when I was a little kid, Twix was my favourite, as Orange Crush was my favourite pop), was slightly stale or whether some change in the consistency of caramel had been engineered. I thought I had a good sensual profile of what a Twix tasted like, and that it had roughly “always” tasted so, and what I was currently eating deviated somehow.
Through some associative quantum stumble (something less than a “Quantum Leap”, for you eighties TV babies), the next thing to spring to mind was some feeling of ancient mortification associated with the Pal-o-Mine, a bar the particulars of which to this day I cannot recall. Save that, like a Twix, it consists of two pieces—a bar always already twain. The stark outlines of a memory related to a Pal-o-Mine stand out in my psyche, but with an equally striking absence of detail. The outlines of what? Some unpleasantness. An embarrassment? A disappointment? A foundational youthful disillusionment? I don’t know, it’s all too Freudian. I only recall that it took place at a historical tourism village to which my class was taken on a field trip; I imagine I was between the ages of six and nine, and there was a Pal-o-Mine involved.
I know that the chocolate bar was my only purchase of the day—perhaps I had never tasted one and was woefully dissatisfied? Maybe some literal interpretation of the name of the bar, too late apprehended, left me beholden to share half of it with another child, surely a minor tragedy for such a penny-pinching young glutton as I remember myself to have been? Or, still more tragicomic, did I feel that flush of humiliation rise to upon realizing that I had purchased a chocolate bar designed to be shared with one’s bosom friend, highlighting the sad fact that I had no such bud? Is it thus the silent mockery of the second portion that impressed itself upon me, to be felt however hazily so many years later?
Possibly it was the frustration and embarrassment of buying a Pal-o-Mine on the mistaken assumption that it was an old-timey chocolate bar, seeing as I was buying it from a period drugstore—you know, like the kind of chocolate bar the pioneers ate—only to have it pointed out by a mercilessly perceptive pretween lout that it was the kind of bar that could be had at any corner store, and further, that it was of an inferior and “gaywad” persuasion. Yet another squandered opportunity to affirm through an act of petty consumerism my normality, in the vain hope of diverting attention from my precocious vocabulary and hand-me-down Esprit T-shirt (that I had so proudly strutted about in until being informed that Esprit was clothing for girls) that indelibly marked me as socially just that side of the pale.
Perhaps, in order to fill out the details, it remains for me to simply eat piles of the chocolate bar until I have my epiphany. But this assumes that recall will come with repeated exposure, and that the recipe of the Pal-o-Mine has not mutated over the intervening decades, compromising the exactitude of the sense-memory relationship. Perhaps the rest of the picture will never be found in the bar, which can at best continue to repeat indefinitely and with gradual loss of strength the same garbled testimony. Only the surround remains—low scrub, weathered wood, and eighteenth-century pioneer reenactment, all shot through with the vivid and abiding shame at which the young are such adepts.