Friday, November 16, 2012

Twinkie Withdrawal

Goodbye Twinkies!

I'm shocked, appalled, afraid. How are we going to stock the shelves of our bomb shelters? Twinkies are the only snack of its kind that has a forty-year shelf life. Are you really going to eat Spam and canned green beans and corn for the next forty years with nothing tasty to top it off? 

Mike sent me out in search of a Twinkie. He said that there aren't any more left at the grocery stores. I stopped at the local market and they didn't have any, so I bought some donettes, HoHos, and a cherry pie.  I didn't bother with the Snoballs. I never liked the Snoballs and they don't even have any nostalgic power. My grandma liked those strawberry and vanilla wafers. I hated them, but there is the love in the association. Just the smell of those vanilla wavers can put me in a different place. Do you know what I mean?

So I went into the store at the gas station.  I have never walked in there.  The Hostess display was at the end of an aisle right in front of the cash register. And they had some Twinkies left!  Whoo hoo!

Mike texted me to tell me that a box of Twinkies just sold on eBay for $100.  That's $10 per Twinkie pack. 

While I was choosing, a man came in and picked up a couple of packs of Twinkies.  I got to the register first, four plain and one chocolate.  I had never tasted the chocolate ones and didn't want my life to end before I had.

"You should be charging $25 a pack for those Twinkies," the guy said as he dumped his Twinkies on the counter.  The supply at the gas station had just dropped by half.

"Maybe you could wait until after you ring up these," I said.  The guy at the register laughed.

"You're not from the Twinkie generation," the guy said as he handed the cashier a ten dollar bill.  Oh man, I was from the Twinkie generation.  I could feel it in my bones.  You tell this kid that he'll never eat another Twinkie again and he'll shrug his shoulders.  You tell someone like me, someone who grew up in the fifties and sixties and it's a totally different story.  Twinkies were invented in 1930.  I wonder if the kids from the thirties and forties feel the same way I do.  Guess I'm going to have to ask some folks.

When I got home, we opened the chocolate Twinkies, cut one of the pastries into thirds and each took a taste.  The smell alone took me back to when I was nine.  We let the dog lick the gooey stuff off the paper from the bottom.  He very nearly took out the second Twinkie, which had been sitting a bit too close to the edge of the dining room table. 

So now, the dilemma is whether we slowly savor the taste of our remaining Twinkies or set one aside to sell on eBay.

Maybe we should hold onto it for forty years and see what it's worth then.  By then, who will remember Twinkies at all?

Thank you for listening, jb
 

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