When Life Gives You Lemons

My snack of choice today is Halls Mentho-Lyptus, Honey-Lemon, with advanced vapor action formula. (God knows we wouldn’t want the merely regular vapor action formula.) This is some kind of cosmic payback because just two days ago I was bragging to someone about how I had not been sick for 10 years. So the gods of Mount Mentho-Lyptus are teaching me a lesson.

I discovered I have six bags of the stuff. There are 30 drops to a bag according to the label, but all the bags are open so I’m not sure what my total inventory is. Apparently I get sick a lot more than I remember. And apparently being sick affects my memory to the point I don’t remember having bought bags and bags of Honey-Lemon drops, with advanced vapor action formula, over the course of previous illnesses.

As I was sucking on my cough drops and experiencing the promised “cooling of my nasal passages,” I wondered why I had six bags of Honey-Lemon flavored Halls. Why not venture out a little and try the Cherry or Strawberry or get really edgy and pop an Ice Blue Peppermint? Then I remembered my grandmother always had lemon drops in a covered, glass candy dish on a side table next to her couch. Either my grandmother was an early marketing agent for Halls, in charge of indoctrinating young children to a taste for lemon candy, or the vice-president of flavors at Halls grew up with a grandmother like mine.

I remember years ago, when I was newly on my own as a young adult, I tried to recreate the hominess of grandma’s house in my apartment by placing a dish of lemon drops on a table near the front door. I think they sat there until the day I moved out. One thing that happens in the fast-food world we live in is we forget how important it is to have traditions, especially food traditions. Never really having absorbed the traditions of our grandparents or parents, many of us, at some point, feel a void between our present and our past. It’s normal to try to bridge the gap by doing what we remember doing as kids. Sometimes that works, but I figured out somewhere along the way we can’t just replicate our grandparents’ or parents’ traditions. They have to make sense to us as adults, and they have to become our own at some point.

My new Cooks Illustrated came today, and I think I saw a recipe for Honey-Lemon Chicken in there. Maybe I can put those six bags of lozenges to good use.