Zingers Last Stand

The internet is a buzz about Hostess going out of business.  Amid dropping sales, labor disputes, and accusations of mismanagement, the powers that be announced last week that they were hanging up their oven mitts and liquidating all their assets. 

                                        

The news hit me with a queasy sort of unease, the kind you might feel watching your parents sell your old toys at a yard sale.  Logically, you know it makes sense. I mean you can't hold on to those things forever, but a part of you is worried.  What if, when that toy is no longer in your life, there will be nothing left to trigger memories involving that toy, and then, SNAP, in an instant a whole section of your childhood will be swept clean from your mind.  It would simply be gone F-O-R-E-V-E-R.  

That's how I felt about the Hostess announcement.  As a health conscious "grown up" who tries to maintain a waist that is narrower than my shoulders, I do not often indulge in the Hostess delights.  However, in another time, when I had the metabolism of a gerbil and no concept of calories or fat intake, Hostess was my favorite sidekick. 

During that time, my grandma lived near The Bread Store (a Hostess Brand establishment).  If I was very well-behaved when I visited, we'd take a walk to the store where I would get a chocolately blissful treat for me and grandma would get a box of pink Zingers for herself. Over the years, I sampled everything the store had to offer from cream filled chocolate cupcakes to the chocolate pudding pie (Don't try this one as a grownup. The pudding tastes like chocolate flavored Elmer's glue.) But those varied and yummy treats are not the Hostess items I’m going to miss.  No, the one item that made me verklempt when I heard about the Hostess liquidation, was the one thing I NEVER wanted at the The Bread Store, and that was the pink Zingers. 

As a child,  I could sum up pink Zingers with the following facts:

1. The stuff on the outside of a pink Zinger is coconut. 
2. Coconut is evil.
3. If by chance coconut proves itself to not be evil, coconut still shouldn't be pink.   

My grandma tried for years to get me to try one.  She explained that it was raspberry flavored, but I scoffed.  If it was raspberry, shouldn’t it be decked out in raspberry flakes, not coconut flakes?  She told me the coconut was just a decoration, and you can’t taste it.  I demanded to know why anyone would use something as vile and disgusting a coconut as a decoration on a food item.  This might be a good time to point out I was the most argumentative child in the known world, and I really don’t know why my parents didn’t sell me to gypsies. In the end grandma would always dine on a pink Zinger, while I chomped away on the chocately item of day.

Years passed, and my visits with my grandma changed.  As her eyesight and body failed her, our walks ceased, and I’d simply run her grocery errands for her. We still had stubborn arguments, but they were somber discussions of why she didn't need a ride home when she was already sitting in her favorite chair in her living room.  Then all too soon she was gone. 

Years later when I was far away from home, I noticed some pink Zingers on the grocery store shelf, and thought I owed it to Grandma to finally give it a try. Turns out Grandma was was right all along; they are raspberry, you can’t taste the coconut, and they are pretty good.  While they still aren’t my favorite treat, I buy them once in a while, and think about my afternoons with Grandma.  And then the pink Zingers simply tasted like home.  

So with Hostess closing its doors forever, I simply consider the fate of pink Zingers and memories of Grandma.