A spoonful of sugar….oh, come on!

Photo by Myriam Zilles on Unsplash

A gas station beckoned this afternoon. Not a fill-up of my gas tank, however. Nope. I ventured out for a fill-up, but with a different type of fuel. The desired fuel is a feature (and also a serious distraction) at gas stations. Rows, rows, and more rows, of candy. My chosen fuel? À Snickers!

OMG, no!

Yes, it’s true, I’m a food snob (with persnickety blood sugar issues) and can go years between ingestions of sugary, but oh-so-nutty and chocolate-y, Snickers bars. Years! And then…and then…this yawning maw of need pops up inside me and I literally watch my car drive itself to a Snickers purveyor. I certainly don’t discriminate with regard to Snickers’ venues - gas stations, convenience stores, drug stores, wherever. Somehow, though, a gas station seems best. (Maybe because people I know are less likely to see my furtive and embarrassed Snickers buy.)

My guilty Snickers purchase is actually a red herring in this particular situation (albeit an incredibly delicious one.) Boing! My internal compass needle of comfort is suddenly pointing to the closest gas station, a dead giveaway that a Snickers acquisition has become my lodestar. And I’m off. Sigh.

But, Snickers as a red herring? What’s with that? (Oh, sure, tell me you’ve never experienced a Snickers-like yearning during trying times!) My drive toward Snickers intoxication is a function of “there’s a hole inside me and I desperately NEED to fill it.”

(With Snickers? Unabashedly, yes, Although in a pinch, a Milky Way would probably suffice. No requisite nutty crunchiness, but still chocolate and gooey and terrible for my blood sugar.)

My psychic emptiness? Well, you asked… The Snickers-driven desire to fill this emotional abyss is a result of feeling like an-out-of-control human in a pained and chaotic world. (Oh, wait, you already know what I’m talking about? Right?) Disconnected from goodness and the ‘other,’ sadly, the ‘other’ is always a villain. Downright painful. I find myself hungry to somehow soothe that yearning ache of internal disconnection with others.

So fortunate that the mythic, and Disney-esque, Mary Poppins, of a “spoonful of sugar,” fame intuited my deep psychic need for goodness and waved her magic wand. (Although I’m pretty sure she doesn’t have a magic wand, but it helps with this particular fantasy.) My designated and soothing “spoonful of sugar” appeared in the guise of an eighty-something genteel Southern woman dressed in her Sunday best, complete with high heels and a sweet hat, on this Saturday afternoon. Me? I was dressed down for a quickie Snickers run or a trip to the recycling center.

As I stepped out of the candy-laden gas station, my elderly Mary Poppins surrogate turned to me, commenting how wonderful it is that we’re both still driving. (My preternatural white hair is, well, a giveaway.) From there, we moved into a sweet conversation about the peccadilloes of aging, both of us laughing at ourselves as we continue to muddle forward, nonetheless.

And there she was - the oh-so-needed spoonful of sugar, helping me reconnect to unexpected (and welcome) kinships in our struggling world, a world so focused on differences. You bet I was smiling after our interaction. I felt full without having eaten the Snickers.

However, human and frail of spirit on occasion, I drove home and ate the Snickers anyway. Leaning into the ‘just human’ card….again. (Smile.)