“At about age ten, during a late summer visit to Sears to buy school clothes, I became aware of the concept of candy by the pound. This was revolutionary. Here were entire stalls of candy, naked as the day they were born, piled up two feet high and God knows how deep, glittering behind glass windows. . . .

What it was—beauty. The sheer, entropic plenitude of gumdrops, jelly beans, orange slices. I might buy any of these, merely for the joy of watching the clerk dig her shiny little silver scoop into the bin, pouring out my portion first in a great plinking rush, then one by one (plunk, plunk) as the green numbers on the electronic scale blinked up.”

—Steve Almond, from Candyfreak, 2004.