“What’s a Mallomar®? Did we ever have them in the house?”

“Never for very long,” I replied. “The girls and I would devour them pretty quickly.”

Ed was reading about the 100^th birthday of the chocolate-marshmallow cookie being celebrated this year by Kraft’s Nabisco division and the cookie’s devotees. I’m sure we would have offered him one and been happy when he turned it down. Each box contained only eighteen cookies after all. The thin dark chocolate shell encases a soft marshmallow and the cookie it sits upon. Some sources say it’s a vanilla cookie, others a Graham cracker; it requires further research. In the meantime, I learn that Mallomars® are seasonal, arriving on supermarket shelves in the fall and disappearing in the warm weather, even though refrigerated trucks no longer necessitate this precaution. It just adds to the cookie’s cachet.

But poor, deprived Ed grew up ignorant of snack food delicacies like Mallomars®.  Also Hostess cupcakes and Sno Balls®, Devil Dogs®, Twinkies®, Ring Dings®, Ding Dongs®, Yodels® and the rest, not to mention the entire panoply of candy bars. “We didn’t have those things in my parents’ house,” he says. Well, we didn’t have them in my parents’ house when I was growing up either, but somehow I became aware of them and developed a lifelong sweet tooth. Also a mouthful of fillings. Ed, with his near-perfect teeth grew up in Colorado where fluoride occurs naturally in the water, and is not much interested in sweets. I, on the other hand, grew up drinking pre-fluoride New Jersey tap water and only stopped getting cavities when there was no longer any undefiled tooth surface. Life is not fair.

There was consternation earlier this year among those of us aficionados of snack cakes when Hostess went out of business. The company made those wonderful chocolate cupcakes with cream fillings topped with dark chocolate frosting and the readily recognizable white icing squiggle. For me, an even bigger loss was going to be the company’s Sno Balls®, cream-filled chocolate cake surrounded by marshmallow icing covered in shredded coconut. They came in a variety of colors depending on the season but a person in the New York area with a birthday on St. Patrick’s Day could pretty much always count on getting Sno Balls® in green. Thankfully, another company purchased Hostess, and the cakes continue.

My daughters do occasionally remember to indulge their mother’s addiction. On one significant round-number birthday, we threw a big party and invited many friends. There was a decorated cake from a bakery for the guests, but also a special snack cake pyramid for me: Hostess cupcakes, Ring Dings® and Sno Balls® artfully stacked on a crystal cake plate. My foodie friends looked in horror at the masterpiece. “You don’t actually like that stuff, do you?” they said.

Yup and had a wonderful time all the next week working my way through the largess.

(Photo: npr.org)

There’s something insidious about the Internet. Well, actually, there’s a lot insidious from the threat of identity theft on down. But what I have in mind this time is the way ads stalk you and pop up at the most inconvenient times.

An example: You’ve checked a site that sells fancy dipped strawberries, and in fact have returned several times to the site trying to decide just which fancy dipped strawberries to send as a gift. Then as the never-ending Great Recession continues, you decide to check a site for bankruptcy lawyers, just in case it comes to that. Up pops an ad for fancy dipped strawberries. It is a morality lesson right before your eyes. If you hadn’t spent a lifetime being tempted by such things as fancy dipped strawberries, you would not be possibly in the market for a bankruptcy lawyer.

The morality lesson continues when you switch from looking for a lawyer to checking your email where you find the United Farm Workers urging your support for strawberry workers in California. The workers protested unsafe working conditions and won, the UFW says, but now are being discouraged from unionizing to assure further protection. And I just contributed to their woes by buying those fancy dipped strawberries. So we can add guilt to my sin of avarice.

My daughter explained how those pop-up ads work but my short term memory loss that comes with old age deleted the information almost immediately. Something about cookies, I think, and there are good cookies and bad cookies, unlike in real life where cookies are both good and bad – good tasting but bad for the waistline. But probably very nice with fancy dipped strawberries.

We seniors  ̶  isn’t that a wonderful term? makes you feel like you’re back in high school  ̶  apparently suffer short term memory loss because we don’t get enough sleep. Or the right kind of sleep, the kind that helps store short term memory. A friend sent me a test (on the Internet of course) in which you look at two groups of faces and then report whether you remember ever seeing those faces before and, the hard part, where you’ve seen them. I scored 100 percent on the first part and exactly at the average mark (for old people) on the second. That explains why here in Los Angeles I keep seeing people who look vaguely familiar but can’t tell where I’ve seen them. They could be actors I’ve seen in movies or on TV – or someone from the supermarket.

The people who devised the faces test say I could improve my short term memory by sleeping more soundly. And that, I’ll bet, would come by not thinking about the Great Recession With No End. Or strawberries.