Every Sunday after church my Dad’d stop at the newspaper store to pick up The Sunday Times.
I walked my Sunday-best into the shop and stood in my father’s shadow just below the register, slid my sticky fingered hand into the candy bin and swiped a piece of Bazooka bubble gum.
The pink of it. The sweet stink of it.
The soft cornered tablet shape.
Crystal sugar that ground against teeth like sand and melted like icing in my throat.
And clinging to the wrapper, the inane pirate-patched Bazooka Joe tiny comic.
The chance to collect cool stuff.
Five minutes off my knees, papery host stuck on my tongue, the Holy Ghost tracking my every patent-leather step, and I stole gum my father would not have hesitated to buy for me.
The force was overwhelming.
The act was Irresistible.
Who knew sIn could taste so sweet?
Until the third fateful Sunday, I was accused.
My father defended his daughter’s honor to the belligerent shopkeeper as I slyly dropped the sweaty wax papered treat back into the bin.
The holy ghost had a good laugh.
I never pinched candy again.
I earned allowance. I saved. I spent.
Down on Soho’s Broome Street, grown-up girls with decorating daydreams can’t resist swank SICIS where you can rifle through their mosaic tile bins and slip your fingers over chicklet shaped glass mosaics infused with real sliver, gold or platinum.
Drop an offered mermaid hued sample in your pocket, or lick the back like a postage stamp.
Does it taste like it popped out of a Pez dispenser?
Or dropped off the counter at Bulgari?
Go to SICIS to get inspired.
Or Daddy Hedgefund willing, to buy.
Me, I browse at SICIS.
I buy at Canal Street Plastics.
At Canal Plastics I gotta pay a buck-a-piece for my 2×2 fluorescent or mirrored plexi samples.
But I don’t have to go down on bended knee for an act of confession.
Kiki at SICIS.
