Once every week or so, I drive the five miles to a shopping center near me. There are plenty of places to spend money, on hardware-related things and groceries and those inedible pickle-juicy sandwiches at that chicken place.
I pass all of those and park in front of the store where everything’s a dollar. Used to be a dollar, anyway.
Inside the door, I walk past the seasonal stuff. This week it’s little headbands with red hearts bouncing on springs atop them. And there’s also a bin filled with green Styrofoam hats with green bedazzled shamrocks all over.
I make a sharp left at the medicine aisle and then a right into the candy aisle. And there, I stand and survey the shelf that holds the best thing about dollar stores.
The slender white boxes with the green words and the dark-brown mints are always there, rows and rows of them lined up like delicious books I can’t wait to read.
The library of candy is vast: Dots and Sour Patch Kids and Whoppers. Reese’s Pieces and Goobers and, occasionally, Goobers’ cousins, the Raisinettes. There are enough confections in that aisle to give me an extra five pounds and also a toothache. But I reject them all, except my happy little Juniors.
They are perfect dome-shaped buttons of mint and dark chocolate, and taste like the toddler offspring of Peppermint Patties. But the two are not related.
Hershey makes the big ones and Tootsie Roll makes the little ones. Candy experts say the Juniors are more strongly minty than the Patties, but I couldn’t tell you because I can’t remember the last time I had a Patty.
There in the dollar store aisle, I grab a stack of the Junior Mints and get in line behind the more serious shoppers with full-size shopping carts filled with the things they need.
Once back in the car, I’ll peel open a box and eat three. That’s what I allow myself, three Juniors at a time. Each box holds 35, and at the rate of three a day, I should get almost two weeks out of a box.
But that’s not how things work with Junior Mints. They are good with morning coffee, they are good when bored, they are good when at a traffic light, they are good while writing a column.
A famous scene from “Seinfeld” shows Kramer eating from a box of Junior Mints while on an operating room balcony watching a surgery. Of course, he fumbles the box and drops a mint, which lands inside the patient below. I think of that scene each time I place my stack of Juniors on the conveyor belt at the store.
“Refreshing,” I say, repeating Kramer’s famous line as the clerk scans the boxes.
The skinny cabinet to the right of the stove is where my Junior Mints live. Right now there are eight boxes lined up there. I want to make sure I never run out because when I visit a friend, I take a box. It’s not good to go empty-handed, and people seem to appreciate the little gift.
And I like to offer my suggestion on how best to savor a Junior Mint. Take exactly three from the box, put them all in your mouth at once and let them melt a bit. Eventually the minty part will turn to liquid, leaving the chocolate coating behind with a bit of a crunch. The deliciousness of it never fails.
They’re supposed to be a dollar a box, but inflation now puts it at a buck and a quarter, but who cares? They’re refreshing.
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