Penny Candy

Aunt Flo's cousin, twice removed on her mother's side, ran a tiny candy store at the foot of the breakwater. It wasn't much more than a shack surrounding a half dozen or so cracked and dusty glass display cases that held penny candy - licorice whips, carmels, jawbreakers, root beer barrels, jelly beans. Around his neck, Uncle Bernie wore a miniature silver scoop on a long silver chain. A penny's worth of candy was one scoop and for an nickel you could open the battered, old red and white cooler and add a bottle of pop from the clear, icy water. It was a kids store and on Saturday afternoons in the summer, Uncle Bernie would sit just outside the door and read to us from The Brothers Grimm, fairy tales filled with blood and gore and unhappy endings, horrifying tales of ogres and dragons and trolls under bridges. Here we learned about witches who cast nasty spells and roasted children alive, about evil dwarves with pointy shoes and scruffy beards, about werewolves and vampires and haunted forests. Uncle Bernie read with enthusiasm and great energy, adding faces, gestures and sound effects to the stories and we were carried away by his imagination and imagery - we shivered with fear and screamed in delight and always begged for more.

Later on the stories became bloodier and more grotesque - Dracula was portrayed with a make believe cape to hide his eyes, an unnerving, cackling laugh and an improbable but completely convincing accent. The Frankenstein monster and Jack the Ripper came to life before our eyes as did Sweeny Todd, Lizzie Borden, The Phantom of the Rue Morgue, even a Lovecraft character or two. Fact or fiction, Uncle Bernie read and acted it all out, capturing us and our curiosity, encouraging us to read and discover the wonder for ourselves. He treasured books and authors and all things literary and wanted us to do the same.

For those who couldn't read - child and adult alike - he opened his home during the evenings and helped them to learn. When my grandmother and others questioned his choice of reading material, he waved them off. Literacy is a gift, he told them sagely, and it should be passed around just like penny candy, otherwise it goes stale. The stories continued without change, all the horror kept our attention until gradually our imaginations grew and we sought out our own stories. And it all began with penny candy and fairy tales.