Fat-Kid Memories

"I love you like a fat kid love cake..."

50 Cent
21 Questions

I don't think of 50 Cent as a great lyricist but this was a great line. I was talking about with this the office manager (a fellow former fat kid) at my job. Is there really any greater love than a fat kid’s love of cake? She hypothesized that maybe our moms might be the only thing us fat kids could love more. I got so amped whenever there was cake around it really was love like love for my mom…and actually cake never got mad at me or anything so actually…

How this all came up was a shipping catalogue she was looking through for boxes and she looked at these small white cardboard boxes with handles that looked kind of like mini-suitcases and it immediately reminded her of the chocolate candy bars that she used to sell when she was in parochial school. I went to Catholic school also [significant memories: 1) being spanked by the assistant principal 2) throwing up in front of the building after being spanked out of guilt 3) pining for communion bread 4) pleated skirts 5) spending three years of my life thinking I was going to hell (now I just know it) 5) pleated skirts and 6) pleated skirts] from grades K-2 before shipping out to a gifted program at a public school in Kensington. The most exciting time of the year was when we got those candy bar boxes. We both remembered how delicious those bars were, they were really chunky with lots of peanuts. They were better than any candy bar that were available in stores and I would always beg my mom to buy a bunch for us. Whaty made them so spoecial was that they were only available a few times a year when we had the sale. I mean they were probably the same as other commercial candy bars just with different wrapping looking back but they were a commodity back then to us. “Never get high on your own supply”-BIG’s wise words had not yet been written to teach me any restraint. Our argument was where the bars came from-she swore they were “World’s Finest” which sounds familiar to me but I always remember them having plain white wrappers with silver foil and a McDonald’s logo on them. But she said that McDonalds had simply purchased the bars from World’s Finest and stamped their logo on them, which actually sounds right. But what made this a real real eery fat kid communal memory was when I said my mom used to freeze the bars to keep me from eating them right away. They’d be hidden in the back and every now and then she would bust them out and the best tasting shit was biting into one of those rock hard candy bars months after the sale had ended and you didn’t think there any more of those bars left (what made them so special was they weren’t in stores) and her mom had done the same thing too. I didn’t think anyone else’s parents would have done that but I guess it was just a fat kid thing.