We are blessed to live in a society that has so much to offer. Some of course are more blessed than others. We have access to so many different foods now, more than at any other time in history. It is incredible to think that we can get in our cars and drive to the nearest grocery store, walk in, and buy fruit from thousands of miles away. But this story isn’t about fruit…..it’s about chocolate.
Why chocolate, you ask? This particular time of year is when chocolate is at its most abundant, Easter. I realize that, for those who are most faithful to their Faith, the correlation between Easter an chocolate is at best lukewarm, but Big Business has made it so that the Easter Bunny made it to the forefront of this holiday
My name is Bill, and I have a problem: I love chocolate. I came upon this problem honestly. I also share this problem with my mom. She and I always looked forward to Easter because the availability of our favourite chocolate, namely hollow chocolate bunnies. My mother would buy these by the score. She would break them up and put them in zip lock bags and store them in the freezer. It was a veritable orgy of chocolate every year.
And then diabetes reared its ugly head. Well, of course it did.
So….what can you do for someone who loves her chocolate so much but just can’t have it? When this happened there really wasn’t much available to replace that which she loved so much. But then, one day while walking through a mall, two weeks before Easter of that year, I saw a sign at the Laura Secord store that made my spirits soar: chocolate bunnies for diabetics!! I inquired within, and though quite expensive, they were indeed for sale. Finally, here was a way to get for my mom a sense of normalcy. And so I bought two for my mom and two for me.
I brought my mom’s bunnies that same night. I just couldn’t wait. To say that she was happy would be a gross understatement. I left her place, beaming, feeling good and walking tall. Driving home, I figured that I may as well indulge too. So I got home, opened one of the bunnies, sniffed it, tasted it, then devoured it. While eating the last of the first bunny, I read the box as a pass time. And there, before me, was a disclaimer (this is not word for word but essentially what it said): do not consume too quickly, may act as a laxative.
Oh-oh. This can’t be good. I needed to call my mom right away to warn her.
‘Mom!’ I said. ‘Don’t eat too much of your chocolate at once!! It’s like ex-lax!’
She responded that she had already eaten both.
I would love to say that the next 36 hours was fun…..but it wasn’t. Upon reflection, I should have booked a colonoscopy because by the end of said 36 hours I was certainly ready in the sense that there was nothing left inside of me. Worse than that, my poor mom ate both of her boxes of super-duper ex-lax. We had to call in Servicemaster to handle the worst of it.
So we learnt our lesson. Until the next year.
Bill's Musings 