My Mother's Candy Factory

I made it through the holiday weekend without chocolate redundancy. This is a covert way of saying I had no M&Ms from my mother’s shop for greedy children.

Since the M in M&Ms is doubled, it is redundant, and I am able to escape it on syntax alone! Elements of Style, man. Elements of Style. (This is to be spoken as David Clennon playing Palmer in John Carpenter’s The Thing: "Chariots of the gods, man. Chariots of the gods.")

Interestingly enough my three nephews, all of whose names begin with the letter "A", have a different approach. Last week, they stopped by en masse ( or is it en vrac ? ) for a reading of the Sunday NY Times, a mystifying of the crossword puzzle, a labyrinthine discovery of comestibles in the pantry, and a cup of tea from the tea gardens of India - courtesy the Grace Tea Company, NY, NY. They consider M&Ms, or more properly, the name M&Ms, to be an oxymoron! To wit, the second M is not equivalent to the first M. It is - in their opinion - as if the twin siblings M were strolling about creation, up and down, here and there, and one takes it into his head that it is high time to put an end to this Edenic idyll, and takes the position that he is the real deal, ego-wise, and strives for distinction: Am I my brother's keeper? he shouts into the gap of creation.
And M was never the same as M again, east of Eden, and all that.

The nephews A had started with a rather fast paced discussion of Ozzie and Harriet and its connection to Umberto Eco’s literature and semiotic: “…the symbolism of Darby and Doc Williams…” “…Joe Randolph’s despair…” “…and everyone knows that it was Thorny!” “Was what?” I said. “What was what?”, nephew #3 inquired with the face of an angel. “What was Thorny…don’t you mean who played Thorny?”, I replied. “No…The Name of the Rose!…it was Thorny.” This was followed by a laughter that you might expect would be the immediate prelude to a particularly unpleasant end of the world as we know it, with Hieronymus Bosch as the guy recording it on video.
It was their opinion that in the nanosecond between the utterance of the first M and the second M, the atoms comprising the Ms were disentangled – across light years – and they became contraries. For them saying M&Ms was like saying “Jumbo shrimp”......or "jummmmbbbooo" ( herein there is a period of time sufficient for the sun to become a red giant, then to recede to white dwarf status, yet at blink-of-the-eye speed ) " sssshhhhhhhhrrimp !"
At this juncture, it was an exquisitely small step to Jorge Luis Borges' story Funes the Memorious. Instead of being merely "M", the first M received the new name “Lavande de Valensole” and the second M “Ferris Buehler’s Day Off”. At this time, my mother put on her apron to prepare dinner (the M in “mother” becoming “Mystery Clock”) and gently shooed us from the summer kitchen with a kindly “retro, daimones!”
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* * note a reprint for me mother!