It’s funny, as adulthood barrels onward, the frequency with which one of the most adult of activities – grocery shopping – spurs the most pointed pangs of nostalgia. Funnier still the mix of melancholy and joy, in those moments in adulthood when an ingrained, benign, childhood prejudice unexpectedly rears its head. And you realize: wait – that’s not an actual rule. I can do whatever I want in this situation.

Several months back I had just such an experience, and its not an overstatement to say I will never be the same.

Food is certainly a source of multi-sensory recollection in the first place. Add to that the fact that grocery shopping with my mother, especially on the rare occasion it was just her and me, was always one of my favorite pastimes. So for me, perusing the aisles is always a moment away from a careening trip down memory lane. 

Full disclosure: as a retail marketer, albeit in the fashion game, I understand this manipulative tugging at one’s heart strings, this fiddling freely with a shopper’s emotions, is part of the process. I also appreciate how and why store layout has all kinds of impact on shopper behavior. Pair that with talented merchants, and you can really and truly guide many shoppers along the very path you want them to take and make them feel it is their choice all along. 

To that end, and eminently ingeniously, the aisle leading to the checkout at my local grocer, Brooklyn Fare, flanks shoppers with floor-to-ceiling cookies on the left, and a wall of illuminated sun-zero manna in the form of ice cream and associated treats on the right. It is the ultimate test of even the most disciplined shoppers to refrain from grabbing one little treat as they head toward the exit. Or more accurately toward the chocolate bar and gummy candy-filled queue shelves. But I digress.

So after dutifully filling my cart with uber-adultish things like broccolini, kombucha, long grain rice, and air-cooled chicken thighs, I boldly set forth toward the registers, knowing the bravery I will have to muster when face-to-face with a who’s who of my lifetime loves: the guilty pleasure that is the Chewy Chips Ahoy of my youth, the paradoxical delight of ostensibly good-for-you Kashi’s oatmeal dark chocolate cookies of my adulthood, the Oreos of every day in between. It’s a test of will power I have pretty much learned how to master, but an occasionally daunting task nonetheless.

That mastery is due to the fact that I’ve never really been commensurately infatuated with ice cream, at least nearly as much as I have been with cookies. While it is generally, when on the menu, my go-to dessert at restaurants (sorbet and/or gelato in its stead, depending on the fanciness of the establishment) – always chocolate, never fruit – and a chocolate (or cookies and cream) milkshake is a MUST to accompany any diner meal, at home it’s something I rarely think of. So if I can’t manage to keep my gaze fixed forward, scanning the right side of the aisle will still allow me to come through unscathed.

That is until one recent trip sent me spiraling down a path from which I am not sure I have any desire to retreat. Sensing the onset of the early stages of some sort of sickness, and raging as I do against that reality in as aggressive a manner as I can muster, I hit the grocery store to pick up my standard mix of the somewhat legitimate (Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, popsicles) and the purely placebo (ginger ale, grape jelly), to try and beat this bug before it set in.

Approaching the final aisle, I had but one item left on the list: the multi-colored, not so much fruit-flavored, throat-soothing magic of Popsicles. I reached for the freezer door enclosing the brightly-colored boxes, such trusty companions in my youth, and I noticed myself smiling…something I rarely do when I am starting to feel sick. 

Something about that silly yellow box, in such exuberant, mass-produced contrast to the staid, sans-serif, oh-so-Brooklyn packaging of the artisanal herbal conconctions two doors down: the dynamically-positioned frozen cylinders of Americana, zooming upward, ready to provide respite from the summer heat, or serve as a delicious, albeit eminently messy treat for members of the Clean Plate Club – the nostalgia washed over me like water from the scalding hot shower I was envisioning for the moment I returned home.

As I went to add the box to my cart, however, I noticed that in my syrupy reflection on summer nights past, I had not grabbed a box of Popsicles, but instead something even better, inherently messier, and instantly more nostalgia-inducing: FUDGSICLES.

I was nearly floored. I loved Fudgsicles. I probably still do. Yet I hadn’t thought of them in years. And I think of EVERYTHING from my childhood. As noted in earlier posts, I have all the Street & Smith’s College Basketball issues from 1984 – 1993; I have cocktail glasses that have ‘Fuck Face’ etched on the bottom, in tribute to the legendary 1989 Fleer Bill Ripken baseball card gaffe, I collect Sports Specialties hats because they remind me of junior high. Nostalgia is a full-blown hobby of mine. Hell, I search regularly for Jell-O Pudding Pops t-shirts (which along with Coogi sweaters have taken on a decidedly more sinister air since Bill Cosby’s predilection for, you know, rape, came to light). But for some reason, I had forgotten about Fudgsicles.

And like an old adolescent flame, your connection with whom had always felt a little more special than others, the memory of which long-since hidden away until your song randomly comes on through some department store’s muzak – the love was real. And here they were.

Almost immediately after realizing what I was holding, my well-behaved boy’s mind kicked in, no doubt the effect of having a parent who understood that an unfettered Fudgsicle habit, especially when coupled with all those cookies with whom I was clearly sharing an open and enriching relationship, might put me on an express train to Type 2 Diabetes, and I thought: “Wait I can’t buy these. It’s winter. You can’t have Fudgsicles in wintertime.” And I went to put them back.

Except, YES I FUCKING COULD. One sweet thing about adulthood is you don’t have to ask. You can just do. Except you also have to calculate: with a scratchy throat starting to appear, the popsicles were the more immediate need. And with my wife’s various soup cleanses occupying much of our increasingly precious freezer space, I could not purchase both. So I made a special mental note that next time, 39 year old me would succumb to my 8 year old me desires and I would partake of these chocolaty vehicles back to childhood.

And man did I ever. One week later, sore throat fully abated, a few bottles of hot pepper and lemon soup thoughtfully if surreptitiously discarded, I beelined for the freezer aisle. It wasn’t just a fever dream. Somehow my kind, independent, eminently “Brooklyn” grocery store actually carries Fudgsicles. Somehow my forgetting about them didn’t impact their marketability. Somehow, after all these years, here they were. And maybe it’s the warmth of the memories of enjoying them as a child. Maybe in particular the fact that they were a favorite of my Dad’s, and brought me back to a time when all I needed to do to make my Dad proud was field groundballs cleanly, and play heads-up defense, and hit my foul shots, before the awkwardness of how to deal with his children as actual functioning independent people threw a kink into the expressiveness of our bonds. Maybe it was all that, but they were even better than I remember them.

Creamy yet dairy-free. Chocolaty but not overly sweet. And, in an admittedly somewhat sad moment, a scan of the nutritional information (which on certain items, Fudgsicles included among them, should just read: “Really?”) reveals a mere 50 calories per pop. For anything this enjoyable also to be guilt and damage-free is almost unfair to the rest of the pre-packaged, highly-processed dessert market as a whole. To the point where I wonder if the Chocolate Chip Cookie Lobby will soon make an aggressive push to outlaw Fudgsicles, given how much they have cut into their collective annual revenue by successfully breaking their near monopoly on my sweet snack open-to-buy.

Maybe that’s overstating it. But as I approach the halfway point in my life, morsels of nostalgia seem to pop up more frequently, and mean more with each passing day. Mid-to-late 80s baseball cards, vintage rap tees, YouTube episodes of Yo! MTV Raps: the sign of a good childhood is the warm sheen of the memories such nostalgia can invoke. Add Fudgsicles – childhood on a stick – to that list. And break out the M.U.S.C.L.E. dolls. Adulthood can wait a bit.