inkgrrl's inkblog

Glory be – our new vending machine has Moon Pies! W00t!! Okay, so I’m way too happy about this, all three of you are thinking. Maybe, but know what? It truly is the little things in life. I’ve been sick for almost two weeks, feverish and horking up great gobbets of lung tissue that look like dead presidents (I’d swear a few of them winked at me as I flushed them down the drain, but that might have been the Cough Syrup From Hell** at work) and after a peaceful weekend spent in the sunlight and fresh air, strolling along the seaside at the Long Beach Harbor and atop horseback in Griffith Park, I am on the upswing – my mind is clear and my energy is returning, albeit slower than I’d like. I have only had one slug of the Cough Syrup From Hell** today, and thank all the gods in every pantheon, I needed no more to function.

The taste of a Moon Pie in the moonlight – not many people outside the South know about them – flaky cookies layered with rich marshmallow crème, drizzled in chocolate if you’re lucky. When I was a kid, there was more marshmallow – it’s not just my imagination, I’ve asked other people who remember them from childhood, and the layer of marshmallow has definitely gotten thinner. And I think that the cookies have also gotten weird – they used to be crumbly, like crackers or butter cookies, but now it’s like all the crumb has been pressed out of them and they have only tightly packed layers to offer up in sacrifice to childhood hungers. Their new layers peel away instead of crumbling cleanly – both easier to be rid of without a great mess and harder to remove. But when I was a child, I didn’t mind fingernails full of melty chocolate or sticky marshmallow – that was part of the fun. You can’t really tell now, unless you look too closely, but when I was losing my baby teeth and growing in my permanent teeth, my left incisor refused to budge. The adult tooth grew in underneath it, completely oblivious to the fact that there was no place for it to go, and so stubbornly made a place for itself by pushing the baby incisor up and out like an old-fashioned garage door slowly being swung open. I remember the last time I had a Moon Pie as a kid I took advantage of the baby incisor’s precarious angle and used it to root underneath my fingernails and scrape out every last trace of the sweet goo. That recalcitrant tooth may also have explained my childhood fascination with vampires.

I was introduced to Moon Pies during my summer on the Mississippi River. Once discovered, I ate them as often as possible – not every day, but at least once or twice a week. I recall one night, sitting on an old, splintered dock watching the fireflies play keepaway from the trail of light the full moon splashed across the water. I was dissecting my Moon Pie, turning it this way and that as I excavated the crumbly cookie in search of the white gooey treasure underneath. I would only eat about every third finger-full of cookie; I’d drop the rest down onto the dark water beneath my toes and wait for the splash of eager fish-lips diving skyward. I liked to think of those fish as my subjects, worshipping me as I cast manna into the heavens of their world.

Moon Pies satisfy my deep inner need for both sugar and power. They are truly the perfect food.

**Note: I don’t call it the Cough Syrup From Hell just for the sake of dramatic license; it is truly vile. To give you an idea of what it tastes like, I ask you to imagine, if you have the gonads or are just twisted that way, that about twenty years ago some fool buried a wad of grampa’s (used) chaw in a Mason jar under the front porch. About sixteen years ago a family of field mice chewed through the rubber seal, moved in and made a nest, then all died off from slow nicotine poisoning. Over the last fifteen years, rainwater has leaked in and made a stew of their little rotting bodies. Now that I’ve given you the primary ingredients, imagine you’ve dug this juicy mess out from under the porch and added honey to it, then took a taste. Guess what? Ain’t no spoonful of sugar in the world gonna make that nasty shit go down right. But thanks to the good folks over at Robitussin, it does work extraordinarily well.