Sublime to Ridiculous

In those days, and in my neighborhood, there was a certain phrase that kids had learned to yell whenever they were struck with a great idea.  I don’t know where this started, whether it was just in our neighborhood, at our school or what.  But whenever someone was heard to yell this, the message was to stop what you were doing and look up, because something good was coming that you didn’t want to miss.  This phrase, yelled with emphasis, was, “Hey, yeah!”

Up in my room that day with Dean, my idea hit me like a Mack truck.  “Hey, yeah!” I exclaimed.

Dean looked up and I continued.   “You know how the grocery stores give out lollipops to kids when they come in?”  Dean’s eyes started dancing; he knew what I was up to.  I launched into the next part.  “We could make our clay candy and give it to the neighbor kids when they come around!”

This was motivation!  We got to work with fervor, creating “sweets” in mass quantities.

The Tootsie Rolls looked like milk chocolate; they were so light.  But the candy bars looked great for the same reason.  The gumballs were made of the dirty-gray looking yellow clay, were extra large, and were not always round.  Our excitement was in overdrive, so we didn’t always check for pointed and uneven areas. 

Probably the most unrealistic items were the candy canes.  It makes me gag just to think how we did them.  Not only was the red clay closer to pink, but I didn’t have any white.  What I did have in my room was a chalkboard.

I spent a long amount of time rubbing a piece of chalk on my board, letting the dust fall into the chalk tray, and pushing it to the end of the tray into a cup.  After the canes were formed with the red clay, I didn’t even try making stripes with the chalk dust.  I just rolled them in the cup of dust.  If anything, they may have looked like Christmas cookies with powdered sugar.

Sometime during this venture, a change was made in our plans.  Rather than giving our candy to the kids, we decided to try to sell it.  I don’t remember whose idea that was, but it compounded our excitement.

I had a magnetic board in my room, one of those teaching toys that came with the plastic letters with a little magnet in the back of each one.  It had been a Christmas present to my sister a few years earlier, and had been passed down to me.  I decided to make a sign to advertise our new business.

I started out by putting our names at the top of the sign.  Feeling a generous need to be polite, I put Dean’s name first.  When he saw that, he got cheeky and said, “Oh, that means I’m First Boss and you’re Second Boss!”

I pondered this.  Let’s see – it was my room, my clay, my idea, my store, etc.  I immediately took down the letters and switched our names around.