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Individually Wrapped -- With Love
By Greg Downs
My mother, my uncle and I cleaned out my grandfather's house. I didn't care about the bedroom or the living room, but I was very interested in the kitchen. We packed up his home-canned beans and the store-bought white hominy I would never eat and the bottles of Coca-Cola and packages of bacon. Even after the cabinets were empty, I kept digging through drawers, checking for the blue bag or the shrink-wrapped orange-colored Reese's wrappers. But I couldn't find them. I realized he didn't know I was coming.
Today, 15 years later, I still slow down in the potato chip aisle at the local grocery store, trying to find the blue bag of Chee-Tos (which doesn't look the same anymore). And in the candy aisle, I make sure they still carry the 10-packs of individually wrapped Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. I check to make sure they're there, and I look at them a while, and I don't buy them.
I've occasionally tasted one or the other of those snack foods, enough to be convinced they haven't altered their flavor in 15 years. And I am sure I would enjoy eating a bag just as much as I used to.
As I said, my grandfather was a magician. He transformed a product into something that had been created only for us to share, to the exclusion of my mother and the rest of the world. But what I didn't know -- what I couldn't have known at that age -- was that the magic didn't stop working when he died.
There the bags are on the shelf in front of me -- but I would never buy them. What I remember about them, what I would be looking for when I tore open the bag, is something no company would be capable of packaging.
