What I Learned From Jelly Beans

To the Editor:

It started out innocently enough. The day before Easter, I was walking up the candy aisle of CVS — the path I always use en route to the pharmacy. I can’t help it; for me, it’s the most interesting set of shelves in the store, and I always check to see if any of my favorite treats are on sale.

For certain items the “on sale” tag is like Magnetic North: just like a compass needle, my body turns and automatically points toward the Toblerone. My arm, without warning or authorization, extends, and my fingers fasten around the prism-shaped object. Bells begin to chime in my pleasure center. Next thing I know I’m grinning foolishly in front of the pharmacy tech, waiting for an antibiotic or some other prescription while shifting a chocolate bar affectionately from hand to hand.

On my way out that day, I walked back down the same aisle and I was drawn to what remained of the Easter candy — not because I particularly liked the traditional selections used to stuff baskets, but because I spotted “old-style” jelly beans. I hadn’t seen those familiar friends in a long time. They were yellow, red, green, orange, purple, and black — all with recognizable flavors from days gone by.

Sweet tooth notwithstanding, I could never warm up to modern-day jelly beans, the size of mini-bbs, with flavors like pina colada, bubble gum, root beer, and key lime. I was always afraid of biting into one of those mystery beans and having to spit out pellets with tastes reminiscent of beef jerky or Skoal. No thanks. Give me the more predictable, larger, meatier jelly beans that require some chewing before swallowing; the pure sugar kind that get stuck between your teeth instead of breaking off the end of a tooth.

Overcome with nostalgia, I grabbed the last package, a clear wrapped, carrot-shaped bunch of jelly beans from the 50s. Since my sons are both in high school, it had been a while since we stuck a milk chocolate bunny, surrounded by colored eggs, onto some Easter grass in a fragile wicker basket. But, we always had substitute goodies, decorating our Easter morning breakfast table, teasing us through our frittata and fruit courses, before we could sample the centerpiece, so to speak.

Believing I would be hailed a hero for my coup in finding the real honest-to-goodness jelly beans from my youth to share with my modern-day gustatorily-deprived sons, I was, perhaps, overzealous. Their response to my presentation: “But we love the other kind — the tiny bad boys with all those cool flavors; those big ones are lame. We hate those!”

The lesson: I’m keeping a small jar of the “new” jelly beans on my desk at the alternative high school in Fairfield where I teach; it will remind me, daily, that if I’m going to motivate students to learn anything, then I need to learn something about their perspective; that it is more about them than me.

Michael Luzzi

Boggs Hill Road, Newtown                                             April 18, 2007