Flashback Friday: The Corn Nuts

When I was little, my mom was a bartender. I guess one day, when I was probably about 7 years old,  she couldn’t find a babysitter, so she took my sister and I to work with her. Since we couldn’t stay in the bar with her and make margaritas, she put us in this little office/stockroom in the back. The office had a television and a couch, but the only channel the television received was “The Shopping Network.” My mom would pop in every so often, bringing us Shirley Temples. For a couple hours, my sister and sipped on our drinks and watched as well dressed ladies convinced us that we could not survive another day without the purses and bracelets they were trying to sell. Unfortunately, neither one of had a credit card, so we grew bored.

We decided to explore. We began this exploration with climbing on the stock shelves and opening up random boxes that were stored there. Much to our delight, we found boxes and boxes of corn nuts, in different flavors. We felt like we had hit the jackpot! So we did what any 7 year old would do: We started gorging ourselves on corn nuts. We would open one flavor, then get bored with it, toss the bag aside, and move on to a different flavor. By the time my mom walked in, we had torn open dozens of packages.

      

To my mom’s credit, her head did not start rotating, and steam did not come bursting out of her ears. I remember her as being remarkably calm about the whole thing. Maybe at that moment, she realized that sticking her little girls in an office for the afternoon may have not been the best idea. However, she did get reprimanded by her boss, and had to pay for all the corn nuts. And our defense? “Mom, we thought they were free.”