I am 13 or 14. It’s a school night. Mom and I work in the kitchen, rattling plates into the dishwasher. My brothers and sister cluster in our wood-paneled family room watching Adam 12. Dad is away on business. I ask my mother about love: When does it come? How will I know? What was it like to fall in love?
Mom answers matter-of-factly. Her tone suggests that the topic is pesky and frivolous. She says a few general things about love and then her announcement: In a few years your father and I will divorce, she says. This blindsides me. On the outside I nod and pretend everything is OK. On the inside I scream and whirl and try to be invisible.
As Mom catalogues her loveless marriage, I hop onto the counter and reach into a cupboard for the box of Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies. After gobbling a stream of them, I remain bewildered, but Mom’s information has lost its initial sting. Little Debbie and her paragraph of multisyllabic ingredients have done their work. After a quick and caloric blizzard of sugar, I segue into an emotional coma.
Sugar is the drug that ferried me through adolescence. When adolescence—and atomic news bombs—rearranged my life’s furniture, I kept bumping into things. Flailing and thrashing, I resisted acclimating to the new floor plans. Sugar (cookies mostly) neatly amped me to the proper degree of numbness to withstand the bruising.
My sugar fix came from the kind of goods that people call food products: Hydrox cookies (fake Oreos); el cheapo, supermarket-brand orange soda; tins of Pillsbury frosting that smelled like brand new shower curtains and came in a ghastly shade of pink; and my favorite—Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies.
Little Debbies. The name itself is palliative and references an aw-shucks American innocence and purity. Little problems? Little Debbie. Big problems? Lots of Little Debbies. When my adolescent insides were a swamp of unrecognizable urges and emotions, I would reach for an oatmeal creme pie. Or two. Or three. Each carton promised a dozen individually wrapped chemical sugarburgers. And each carton delivered just what I needed—a sugar buzz so intense, it was the only audible thing inside my head.
The Little Debbie logo is unerasable from my memory: a swath of red shaped like a bow, a jovial typeface, an image of a smiling girl with curly auburn hair wearing a jaunty hat. Little Debbie? I guess so. Little Debbie looks untroubled. Maybe Little Debbie appears so carefree because she gets to eat all the oatmeal creme pies she wants. Or maybe she looks so vacantly happy because she is Little and will forever remain so.
On the Little Debbie website I learn that Little Debbie is a real person and the granddaughter of O.D. and Ruth McKee, a young married couple, who at the height of the Depression lived in their car selling snack cakes to eke out a living. The couple hit it big in 1960 when they put Debbie’s face and name on a box. Little Debbie took away their problems, too.
I am 42. It is a school night. I live in earnest and melancholic Eastern Europe teaching 20-somethings how to be professional reporters in post-Communist countries. Some days I feel lonely, one-dimensional and weary of being on the outside of the culture I live in. When those gusts blow in, I find myself eating more sweets than usual, relying on the cheap childhood balm of sugar to file the edges off of my feelings. Since my childhood I have added to my repertoire of coping skills, but I still subscribe to sugar therapy from time to time. When the going gets tough, it’s tough not to eat cookies.
In a fit of nostalgia I ask a friend from the States to mail me a carton of Little Debbies. So far from childhood and so far from all that is familiar, I crinkle off the Little Debbie wrapper. I gobble the moist oatmeal pie, observe the sheen that remains on my fingertips, feel the initial hum of sugar as it cartwheels into my bloodstream. I wait. If I were 14 I would be waiting for the sugar stun gun. But this is decades later.
I eat another. And a third, just for old time’s sake. Am I reliving painful memories? Relieving them? Will I regress? Will I regret? Here and now, exactly what am I feeling?
Absolutely nothing.
