Feeding the Inner Child

I have had a yen for Hostess Raspberry Zingers since I saw them in the vending machine in the lobby of my apartment building. They brought to mind an episode of childhood shame -- my earliest actual memory of feeling like a Weird Kid.

I'm three or four, thin-skinned, unsocialized, and preliterate. My father has begun my cultural education by reading me Milton, Mark Twain, and J.R.R. Tolkien. My mother has resourcefully accompanied me through the Big Cat Phase, the Dinosaur Phase, and the Indian Phase, and is steeling herself for the impending Fairy Princess Phase. We eat wholesome food and watch Public Television.

I attend a summer day-camp, to which everybody brings a brown-bag lunch. One of the counselors has organized an unofficial dessert swap, where you can trade your prepackaged goodie for some other prepackaged goodie out of his stash. I am fascinated by this, but I never have a prepackaged goodie. I have boring things like fruit. Finally I beg my mom to pack me something sweet, and she obliges with sesame halvah from the health-food store. I offer it to the Twinkie Broker. He won't take it. It's too weird.

I throw a fit. He'll take anybody else's dessert, but he won't take mine. Embarrassed by my tears, he lets me pick something from the stash; but it's not a swap, it's charity. I remember the item being huge, cream-filled, with a sticky red coating and coconut on the outside. I had no idea what it was, and I was crying too hard to enjoy it or even remember what it tasted like.

Cut to the present. I'm thirty-four, recently relocated, trying to make art and get paid for it, and constantly plagued by feelings that I'm not cool, not commercial, not well-packaged, small and grubby and homemade. I'm working through the Artist's Way, a program which maintains, among other things, that the artist is a child, which must be nurtured, validated, comforted, allowed to play, and occasionally indulged. I decide to indulge my inner artist-child with Hostess Raspberry Zingers.

Of course, by the time I get to the vending machine, they're sold out, so I go to a convenience store and get the last packet on the shelf. It is slightly squashed. I take it home anyway.

I lay out a little plate on a little folding table.

I light a candle.

I tell myself, "What I have to trade has value. It's not too weird. It doesn't need flashy packaging. What I have to trade is the real thing."

I eat my Hostess Zinger.

It is, predictably, gross.

It's the idea that counts. Maybe now, having allowed my artist-child to thumb its nose at the Twinkie Broker, I will get it some sesame halvah. We would like that.