Today, we mourn collectively, North and South, rich and poor, black and white, Democrat and Republican, religionists and atheists. Is there a person living who can recall an event since the Kennedy assassination that has brought the nation so together? Hostess, the maker of the iconic Twinkie, has been Romneyed, plundered by takeover artists and financial pirates, and is no more. But in this hour of sorrow, we must learn to put things into perspective, for in all such tragedies there are things from which we can take solace.
I, for instance, have never actually eaten a Twinkie, having been averse from an early age to creamy substances, be they composed of real cream or chemical stews. There was no redeeming feature in the substance surrounding the cream that tempted me to overcome this aversion. Not so, I confess, with the Twinkie’s cousin, the Hostess Cup Cake. How was I to know that while the color was chocolate, any chemical resemblance between it and the holy substance that was worshipped by our neighbors to the South long before Columbus, was purely coincidental? And don’t even get me started on Ring Dings, for which I also overcame my aversion to cream, which I purchased numberless times from the little grocery store near the spot where, as a paperboy, I waited for the man from the Hartford Times to deliver my papers. He was often late- always, he said, because the presses broke down, and I always believed him, but alas I now know that it was more likely his spirit had broken down, and he was comforting himself at a bar while I shivered in the cold and comforted myself with Ring Dings. At all events, I can date my last Ring Ding from on or prior to the date I last delivered a newspaper, and my last Hostess cupcake from long before then.
But let us not forget Wonder Bread, which I, along with probably 80% of my contemporaries, ate in vast quantities on an almost daily basis in those golden years. This bread like substance, we were assured, built strong bodies 8 ways, a number increased at one point to 12 under the pressures of competition, no doubt from Sunbeam, which manufactured a similar substance. We believed it, and who knows, it may be true. While the growth does not occur in the three spatial dimensions with which we are familiar, nor even in the fourth dimension of time, it may very well occur within those tiny curled dimensions posited by string theory. The possibility cannot, at this point in our state of knowledge, be completely gainsaid.
Still, along with so many of my contemporaries, if asked, I would have said that I took some small measure of comfort in knowing that these products were still on the supermarket shelves, even though, like almost all of those contemporaries, it would never cross my mind to buy them. Nonetheless, like Velveeta cheese, they served as an ever present reminder and bridge to times past. They will be missed, for at least a couple of weeks, after which we will all go about our business and forget all about them.
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