I’d forgotten to mention my exciting news, which is that Giant Eagle now has Pudding Pops!

Okay, you can stop laughing now, because I really do love Pudding Pops. They seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth from about the time I was in high school until this year. I’d occasionally peruse the freezer aisle, just checking to see if anyone had anything like them, but no one ever did.

Yet when we were in Giant Eagle, walking past the freezer section, Michael said, “Look! Pudding Pops!” I immediately assumed he was taunting me; after all, I hadn’t seen them in years, why would they appear now? Yet there they were. A single box. Sitting, waiting for me.

I snagged the box, took it home, and ate four.

Strange thing is that I’m not even sure why I like them so much. I don’t particularly like the vanilla ones (in fact, I told Michael he could eat those, although not any other flavor [No, I don’t know why he puts up with me either]) but the chocolate—ah, the chocolate. It’s slightly different from fudgesicles, and slightly better, but I can’t explain why. Perhaps because fudgesicles should only be eaten at the pool, walking fast across burning hot cement, to get to the shade where you eat them as fast as possible before the entire thing melts and drips down your arm.

But Pudding Pops are to be eaten whenever and wherever, until there is nothing left but a stick, and that sitck you chew on while you wander around, until you hear the voice in your head say, “If you fall with that stick in your mouth you’ll hurt yourself!” So you stop chewing on the stick and throw it away, feeling guilty about allowing grown-up things to intrude upon a childish pleasure.

So you eat a second, because when you were a kid, you were only allowed to have one at a time; so you convince your brain that there are advantages to being an adult after all.