As near as I can remember, it’s been 20 years since I ate my last Chuckle. To be honest, I don’t miss them a bit.
You do remember Chuckles, don’t you? Vaguely pillow-shaped, jellylike candies, each about two inches long, covered with a crust of granulated sugar that could reduce your tooth enamel to its constituent molecules on contact. Chuckles came in the standard colors of the confectionery spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, and black. The red through green ones you ate; the black one you stuck under your movie theater seat to be chipped away--and perhaps carbon-dated--by archeologists in the twenty-third century.
As a child I had an insatiable appetite for Chuckles, but as an adult I began to cool on them. Mostly it was the name that bothered me; something about it was just too chipper. For years I had been walking up to candy counters and saying--with ...
