I was one of those children who loved black licorice. At Easter, the black jelly beans were my favorites, and when we went to the health food store, my mom would sometimes buy me a rare treat: the leathery treasure of a Panda bar. I love all the things about licorice that probably turn other people off: the old-fashioned, spice-cabinet smell; the metallic, medicinal taste; the chewy texture that would stick in my teeth. Every year at Halloween, while other kids reached for the Snickers, I crossed my fingers and hoped at each house for a coveted, full-size box of Good & Plenty.
I loved their rainmaker noise, the way they slid around inside the box almost musically, as if 88 piano keys were cascading together inside the purple-printed cardboard. Long ago, so early that I came to experience the memory as established fact, I had decided the whites were the Goods, and the pinks were the Plentys. They lived like two ancestral families tumbling together in their narrow paper neighborhood, the Leaf Candy Company’s version of Montagues and Capulets, or Jets and Sharks.
I used to pretend they were medicine, separating the pink and white pill shapes into self-prescribed rations, and then dose myself, alternating my regimen from one color to the other to keep the piles even. As a kid, this organization was intensely satisfying, but over the years, I started to hypothesize that their color intended flavor. I would nibble away the candy shell the way I imagined a squirrel would engage his acorns, with mincing precise bites, tasting for change. Sometimes I would suck the coating off, closing my eyes and focusing on their taste with an existential urgency: I had to know, could a Plenty pass for a Good? But whether pink or white, the candy coating always tasted the same, benign as paper, dissolved in a swirl of grit. The colors were just a costume. It soothed me to impose order to this candy universe, especially during the dissonance of Halloween, when masks obscured familiar faces and friends looked scary while the bullies dressed like princess angels, or politicians.
In a year full of difference, 2020’s Halloween will also break tradition. I will miss our convivial town-center trick-or-treating, the hot dogs and popcorn, the haunted church. Between the coming COVID-19 surge, the intensity of the election, and the looming, socially distanced holidays, I am preparing to finish the year feeling more than my fair portion of lonely and afraid. I am trying to take small comforts and celebrate small joys. I will remind myself, even when you don’t get a full-sized box, both Good and Plenty can be delicious, and indistinguishable.
Lucinda Bowen is a Harvard resident and a sometime contributor to the Harvard Press.
