True Confections (34 page)

Jacob will delegate some of the Bao-Bar production supervision in order to work with me on refining the manufacturing recipe so we can go into production. There is no reason to jettison the humanoid form. We can modify the Little Sammies mogul molds to make something more modern and streamlined in shape, genderless and featureless (a bit like the Academy Award Oscar statuette, but plumper and smoother), but within the same basic Little Sammies dimensions and specs.

What I envision will be a pair of pieces that will be packaged together. The first one will have a solid white-chocolate core, a white chocolate as good as we can make it, using pure Czaplinsky vanilla and high-quality cocoa butter. Frankly, I would want to aim for something very equivalent to the Green & Black’s white chocolate, with as comparable a flavor and mouthfeel as we can achieve. But, in memory of Sam, ours will be just a little saltier. We will pan this piece with the Little Sammies coating, so they will have that same familiar, shiny finish, but perhaps with a darker chocolate, one with a lower sugar content in keeping with contemporary taste.

The second piece will have the identical form, but the core will be an increment smaller, and it will be made with our original, fudgy Little Sammies recipe, which will give this new line the familiarity and continuity of a brand extension, and will appease those aficionados who will mourn the end of Little Sammies.
(If only Peter Paul had offered something similarly compensatory to the Caravelle mourners!) We will coat this piece in white chocolate. In other words, we will use the Little Susies formulation, but the two pieces together will match, and will share this new, identical, genderless shape. We will package them as a pair, and by selling two instead of three in a pack, we can keep the unit pricing in the Little Sammies range, despite the higher-quality ingredients, which will cost us more, piece for piece. They will be delectable. This new line will be what Sam, and Eli before him, would have called a true confection.

Of course, in the most basic sense that matters most to the consumer, this new piece isn’t exactly new, but has the appealing blend of familiarity and newness, since it is in some ways a reintroduced upgrade of Little Sammies. I am reminded of the brilliant Post Shreddies campaign that Ogilvy & Mather started a couple of years ago in Canada. Shreddies is a shredded-wheat square breakfast cereal that was cleverly relaunched with a tongue-in-cheek campaign promoting new Diamond Shreddies, which were simply the same old square Shreddies viewed from a different angle. (The Third Reich did precisely the same thing with the traditional swastika form by turning it forty-five degrees.) They even marketed boxes promising a “combo pack,” with both square and diamond Shreddies in equal proportion. Sales, which had been stagnant, exploded.

For the new wrapper, I’d like to keep the continuity of a Zip’s umbrella, but without color, with the name of the candy in white on a black umbrella, against a checkerboard background, all in black and white (a subtle tip of the hat to the Abba-Zaba checkerboard border, to be sure, but surely they can’t copyright such a universal design as a checkerboard). I think the time is just right in our history, as a candy company and as a nation, if I may say that without sounding too grand, for a black-and-white
contrasting piece such as this. And I mean black and white in every sense.

During the Little Susies crisis, Julie told me that the term “white chocolate” is ghetto slang for two things with opposite meanings. Intriguingly enough, the term can be used to deride a black person who acts white, and it can also be used to deride a white person who acts black. Surely this is an excellent moment for this paired candy piece with something to say, one white on the outside and brown on the inside, and the other brown on the outside but white on the inside.

I have been thinking long and hard about what to name this new line, and I believe I have come up with the perfect name, one that has a friendly and cheerful sensibility, yet sounds timeless and classic, like Oh Henry! Julie and Jacob have agreed to it, if Howard doesn’t object. It will be in his best interest not to object. Who knows, he might even like it. We will call this new candy the Say Howdy!

W
HEN
I
WAS
pouring starter fluid on the papers, and when I struck the match, and as I fed the sheets to the flames, I found myself, college degree or not, thinking about not just the selflessness but also the literariness of my act. I did, after all, intend to major in English at Middlebury, and as these pages should have made abundantly evident to any reader, despite the turns my life has taken, I have educated myself. And I thought about how Thomas Carlyle’s only copy of the manuscript for
The French Revolution
, which he had sent over to his friend John Stuart Mill, was thrown in the fire by Mill’s maid. Carlyle rewrote it. So many other significant pages have gone up in smoke. Thomas Moore burned Byron’s memoirs. Jane Austen’s sister Cassandra
burned her letters. Henry James burned … well, we don’t really know what he burned.

Kafka wanted
The Trial
burned, but he was thwarted. If Nabokov was serious about wanting his last, unfinished novel to be destroyed, he should have done it himself. It is rare to find sufficient loyalty when it comes to honoring such a request. Miss Tita, though a fictional character, is an example to emulate, burning the Aspern letters one by one as she did, in order to honor her aunt’s intentions. I believe that my burning of all the old files and documents at Zip’s Candies was the best way I could honor Sam’s intentions. And that’s the truth.

“Truth is truth to the end of reckoning.” That’s Shakespeare, Irene,
Measure for Measure
, which I happen to know you have never read or probably even heard of because you haven’t been curious about what you don’t know for a very long time, not since college. And even then, when that expensive education was at your disposal, when you could have done anything, gone anywhere, studied anything, thought about anything, you didn’t have time for Shakespeare, because you were too busy reading about gendered space in the workplace and the sociology of heterosexuality and feminist environmentalism.

H
OWARD
Z
IPLINSKY MADE
me a member of this family, and now he is living a world away, where he is the Grandest Tiger in the Jungle, even though he left most of his beautiful shirts behind. He believes he has changed himself into the person he was always meant to be by living that life. Maybe I have changed myself, too, by finally accepting that I am also living the life I was meant to live.

I will end my affidavit here. Leonardo (it is as erudite to call
him by his first name as it is uneducated to call him “Da Vinci”) said that art is never finished, only abandoned, and I can only add that most everything important in life is never finished, not just art. Julie and Jacob are coming over for dinner so we can work on the details of the Say Howdy! launch. Madagascar is eight hours ahead of us, so if we wait until midnight, when it is his morning, they can call Howard and talk to him about the name of our new candy line (if they can get through to their father on that primitive telephone connection). It will be just the three of us on our own, like old times, when Howard was in Madagascar, and I would let the children stay up until midnight in order to call him while he was having his breakfast, because we missed him. Surely it’s a perfect night for a breakfast-dinner. I have flour and eggs and milk and butter. I will make a huge big plate of the most lovely pancakes, as yellow and brown as little Tigers.

W
ITNESS MY SIGNATURE THIS FIFTEENTH DAY OF
A
UGUST
, 2009
S
IGNATURE OF DECLARANT: