{"id":24942,"date":"2011-12-22T14:09:38","date_gmt":"2011-12-22T19:09:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=24942"},"modified":"2011-12-22T14:09:38","modified_gmt":"2011-12-22T19:09:38","slug":"those-are-marshmallow-clouds-being-friendly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/12\/22\/those-are-marshmallow-clouds-being-friendly\/","title":{"rendered":"Those Are Marshmallow Clouds Being Friendly"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>My first shift at the candy store was on the first day of October, my last just before New Year\u2019s, but when I talk about it now, what I say is, \u201cLast Christmas, when I worked at the candy store.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the world of candy stores, and this candy store in particular, Christmas is a perpetual condition that just happens to spike at the end of the year. A red-and-green decorating scheme carried throughout the shop\u2014I could not escape it, even when I retreated, as I sometimes did, to the store\u2019s one bathroom, also tinged with red and green, just to shut out the world for a minute or two. On the sales floor, the shelves were heavy with saltwater taffy and boxes of truffles and delightfully analog toys\u2014balsa gliders, pick-up sticks, chunky wooden puzzles. The general effect was that of being buried inside the holiday stocking of a child who\u2019d been very, very good that year\u2014along with the child himself, and a hoard of his less well-mannered friends and their overstressed, oblivious parents.<\/p>\n

I took the gig shortly after finding myself laid off from the job I\u2019d had for the last four years as an editor at a music magazine. I felt adrift and thought tending to a candy store, such a bastion of simple pleasures, might anchor me more firmly to the world, and also I thought that money might be a thing I\u2019d might want to have again. But in my vague desperation I had forgotten about humans\u2019 terrific knack for rendering even the most ostensibly pleasant pursuits completely soul crushing, and how that tendency increases as the winter days darken.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My shifts were a sticky whorl of nuts and sugar and ecstasy and misery. Soon it did not matter if the children were screaming out of delight or distress, if the last-minute shoppers were frazzled or friendly, if I had to seal ten bags of\u00a0gum balls\u00a0or ten dozen\u2014I was caught in a loop of seasonal and existential despair. Even the free candy did not help me. During this time, my one reliable coping mechanism was to give myself over to the power of our management-mandated holiday-themed satellite radio station. I used to believe stores played incessant Christmas music to anesthetize shoppers. But now I\u2019m inclined to believe it\u2019s for the sake of holiday retail employees\u2014offering a synthetic place for their minds to drift toward, away from the maddening, small realities at hand.<\/p>\n

\u201cHard Candy Christmas,\u201d the great Dolly Parton solo version from The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas<\/em> motion-picture sound track, was in heavy rotation on the station and quickly became the secret, albeit comically literal, anthem of my disoriented underemployment. In the movie, which I\u2019ve never seen, Dolly and her girls sing to mourn the shuttering of their whorehouse, but they could have been narrating my untethered thoughts of the previous three months: \u201cMaybe I\u2019ll sleep real late \/ Maybe I\u2019ll lose some weight \/ Maybe I\u2019ll clear my junk \/ Maybe I\u2019ll just get drunk.\u201d I don\u2019t remember the last time I so deeply related to a song, though I\u2019m sure, whatever it was, it wasn\u2019t about prostitutes.<\/p>\n

But \u201cHard Candy Christmas\u201d was just my wallowing music; a cheerier song became the sound track for my daily work of pecan-tin assembly and shelf restocking. Two versions of \u201cMarshmallow World\u201d populated the store\u2019s holiday satellite-radio playlist, one by Bing Crosby and one by Darlene Love. The lyrics don\u2019t mention the holidays specifically; it\u2019s really just a song about snow. \u201dIt\u2019s a sugar date \/ What if spring is late?\u201d Crosby shrugs in the song\u2019s first hit version, released in 1950. It\u2019s a distant cousin of \u201cWhite Christmas,\u201d another Crosby song, one that has long inspired absurdly false nostalgia in the children of Tennessee, where I grew up, and Georgia, where I\u2019ve lived since college, and where the best memories we could manage were of brittle, lightly dusted lawns, more greenish-gray than white.<\/p>\n

When it did snow, at least in Tennessee, it was usually in February or March, often after the trees had already started to bud. This must have been why \u201cMarshmallow World\u201d so charmed me: it was a blessedly neutral offering among mass quantities of forced festiveness\u2014and a reminder, too, that something lay beyond Christmas, beyond my time behind that counter, whether it was the beginning of spring or a late-season snowfall or something else entirely.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also a fun song, and unusually pliable. Crosby\u2019s is supremely sentimental; it\u2019s hard not to imagine the scene black and white, him strolling hand in hand with some dame on a Hollywood backlot as production assistants shake fake white powder down on them from hidden scaffolding. (When it comes to seasonal odes to lovers and inclement weather, this one\u2019s a nice alternative to both the played-out sweetness of \u201cWinter Wonderland\u201d and the creeping date-rapeyness of \u201cBaby, It\u2019s Cold Outside.\u201d)<\/p>\n