Remembering the candy store

      Pretzel rods are my madeleines.

     Those small, lemon-scented French sponge cakes triggered involuntary recollections for Marcel Proust. Pretzel rods do it for me. They are, as the French novelist would say, vessels of persistent memory.

      They are also really tasty.

      We hadn’t bought them in a long time, until recently. Too salty, I thought, too much sodium. Not good for the diet.

      But then, in the supermarket a couple of weeks ago, I checked the label on a bag of pretzel rods and discovered that the high sodium content referred to the serving size, and the serving size is three pretzels, and consequently if I only ate one at a time, I’d be ok.

      So, I bought a bag. And when I got home and opened it up and had my first pretzel rod in, I don’t know how long, I was—like Proust—immediately transported back to my past. Unlike Proust, however, my past was not revisiting the small French village of Combray but the neighborhood candy store in the Bronx.

      I don’t remember what was the actual name of that candy store or if it even had a name. We just called it the candy store. But I do recall that pretty much every urban neighborhood seemed to have one back then, places where for small change you could get individual candies, you could get wrapped Clark Bars, you could get soda drinks—like a vanilla Coke—and you could hang out.

      Yeah, just like in West Side Story.

      And pretty much always, at the far end of the candy store counter, past the soda glasses and the black licorice bins, beyond the Superman and Archie comics, I recall the tall, round glass cylinder filled with pretzel rods. It had, I can see clearly, a glass or tin lid. You’d lift the lid off and one rod would come up with it. You grabbed it quickly before it fell off.  

      Some of us would suck the salt off the rods before biting down. Others, after grabbing our first rod, would dip the cover back in and take a second or a third and then sort of use them as drumsticks before biting them down to the nubs.

      Of the cornucopia of attractions in the candy store, the rods were my favorite. My friends Richie and Andy liked them, too, and I’m just realizing now that no kids today are named Richie or Andy anymore.

      I had other favorites, too. Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy, which was so rock solid you had to throw it against a wall or drop it on the floor to soften it up. Necco Wafers. Jujyfruits.

      All good. All worth the few cents and the cavities they were to bring. But I’m not sure any of them would immediately conjure up the past like a madeleine-like pretzel rod.