With Apologies to Millie Small

My boy Lollipop was named while I was still heavily medicated. I don’t know why the nurses let me do that; much less why I didn’t consider changing it once I sobered up. It made sense at the time – but didn’t make sense in the seventies?  Lollipop had difficulty in school. Children can be terribly unkind to those who seem different.  He retreated into himself and made very few friends, choosing instead to watch Charlie and the Chocolate factory over and over on our Betamax.  When Lollipop was fifteen, he ran away, returning eleven days later with his hair dyed a brilliant orange.  He came home from his first year of college with a candy swirl tattoo over the whole of his face.  He briefly toured with a punk band, but fell in with a bad crowd, as they say.  The last time I saw him, he said he was clean and sober, and had pioneered a system for fabricating cloth from sugar cane.  It seemed like a marketable venture at the time, but after I had given him my savings as seed money, he disappeared. I think of him often – mostly in the candy aisle of the grocery store.  Though my diabetes prevent me from buying anything, I sometimes spend hours standing under the florescent lights wondering why it didn’t occur to me to name him George…


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