FINDING THE CANDY OF MEMORY

My maternal grandparents used to take my sister and me to the Red Stone School (aka The Little Red Schoolhouse) and the Martha Mary Chapel in Sudbury.  After seeing these places and hearing my grandmother's version of the "Mary Had a Little Lamb" tale, they would take us to the old-fashioned store for penny candy.

This store was fascinating, a little dark, and had a player piano at which sat a life-sized doll of a little girl.  The doll was electronic in that she moved at the waist while perched on the piano bench, seeming to play as the sheet music rolls powered the music.  She moved exactly like the animatronic figures from the Jordan Marsh Enchanted Village display, and, to a small child like me (I was about four or five at the time), I believed the magic.

My sister and I are on a one-day adventure exploring the old days.  We drive by our childhood house in our old neighborhood, drive past the park (that, despite it being a school vacation day in a nice neighborhood, had no one in it), and stop by my sister's elementary school.  We swing past the old Nobscott shopping plaza (pretty desolate with shops long-closed-down).  We follow my handwritten instructions to the letter, but my sister doesn't know where we are going.

The night before, I decide to do some snooping.  I open Google on my computer and put in such strange combinations as: penny candy near grist mill in 1960s.  Nothing will come up, I tell myself.

But, I am wrong.  While there are no pictures of the doll at the piano, it appears that the store still stands.  Even better, it will be open when we are a few miles away on our exploration extravaganza.  I jot down the address, and this is exactly where my sister and I are headed in my car.

We're going to a secret place, I tell her, driving along route 20.  I cannot keep the secret long, though; she recognizes the place as soon as she sees it.  I park and we go inside, and, for the most part, it's more of a tourist attraction than a candy store, but the working candy store is still magnificent and takes up an entire room the size of a small home.

Some of the old attractions are still there: cast-iron wood stove, carved candy cases, wooden boxes and crates for merchandise, and the upstairs old-fashioned post office with antique stamped letters in the slots.  The piano, however, is gone.  The doll playing the piano is nowhere to be seen.  I vaguely recall she was gone the last time I went there decades and decades (and more decades) ago.

Still, the adventure is there, another childhood moment re-lived and reckoned with, brought out from cobwebbed memories to spend time in another dimension; a melancholy yet sedate Twilight Zone.  We resist the trinkets and the candy.  We decide instead to split a piece of fudge for old times' sake.  The fudge isn't that great, but the time spent together is.