Emotionally, intellectually and nutritionally, I haven't changed much since I was 10. I was a mature 10, but still. The maturity hasn't scaled well.
Katrina was visiting here when I had pneumonia—specifically, when my delivery of feeling-sorry-for-myself groceries arrived. She helped the guy unload my boxes of Captain Crunch, my frozen pizzas and White Castles, my Cheetos and Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies. It wasn't all junk food, I noted. "I also ordered Maalox and toilet paper."
Also in that shipment was nature's perfect food: Nutty Bars. Long before they became a Football Weekend rental car staple—"Bar me, baby."—they were the "extra" of choice in my elementary school cafeteria. If you were so lucky as to have a quarter, it was certainly earmarked for chocolaty/peanut buttery wafer goodness. I peeled them apart, eating them one long, thin wafer at a time. Still do.
As I barreled through the decades, it gave me an odd solace to note that although Pepsi had quadrupled its price and gasoline had simply added a zero to its own, Nutty Bars were the purest of childhood time capsules: the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s flew by, but Nutty Bars stubbornly remained 25 cents.
Until now. These say "35 cents" on them (only they use the symbol I'm too lazy to look up the ASCII code for). The price hike is demoralizing. Childhood: lost.
I am officially ancient, out of touch, old. Time for some caloric consolation.