Penny

One of my best memories of being a kid is penny candy.  Oh how I LOVED penny candy.  I grew up in a small town on Main Street.  If you left our house and headed to the right, in only a couple of blocks you would be at the A&P.  Next door to the A&P was Gardner’s Service Station (one of those where the guy came out and your parents would say something like, “Fill ‘er up, please.”  and, while the gas was pouring into the tank, the attendant would wash the windows.) and inside that gas station was a glass counter filled with containers of penny candy.  Oh it was like little kid HEAVEN!  There were two glass shelves inside the counter and then the bottom of the counter itself.  ALL LINED WITH PENNY CANDY.  My cousins and I (that's us in the picture, I am second from the left.) used to walk down to Gardner’s every chance we got (funny how it was annoying when Mother asked me to walk to the A&P and get something she needed but perfectly wonderful when we were going to the service station for penny candy.).  The service station owner kept all that penny candy because he loved it when the kids came in to buy it.  He was the nicest old guy- very kind and so happy to see us every time we went in.  He would engage us in conversation and act truly interested- not like most adults of that era who had more important things to do besides talk to kids.  We would tell him what we wanted and he would place our treasures in little brown bags—we always twisted the top part of the bags and carried them by the twisted part.  Those little bags were practically worn out by the time we finished our candy because we opened and closed it with the taking of each piece.  We bought Bazooka bubble gum; Mary Janes; caramel crèmes (you know the caramel with the cameo lady in the middle); Necco; tootsie rolls; kits (those things could really stick to your teeth); Nik-L-Nip (the sugar water filled tiny wax soda bottles); Pixie stix; etc…  Sometimes, we would spend a nickel and get one of those big Sweet Tarts.  It took forever to eat one of those things but we didn’t stop until the end- when our tongues and lips felt like they’d been sanded down with rough sandpaper.  But we didn’t care and we’d go right back and do it again the next time.  It’s a wonder any of us still have any teeth left in our mouths.   

There were days when we would venture further down Main Street to Summey’s Drug Store for the most wonderful Cherry Cokes IN THE WORLD.  And we would stop in at Charlie’s Drugs after school on our way to choir practice for a soda and a snack.  During the summers, when we went to the pool, we bought bottle cokes and poured Tom’s peanuts into them.  But the penny candy?  That was always reserved for Gardner’s Service Station on the corner next to the A&P.

This is the 18th day of NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) for the month of March. The theme for this month is: in a word! My chosen word for today is: PENNY because I'm still thinking about the previous two prompts (read: my brain is having difficulty figuring out what to write.).