The Sunshine Bars

Tonight we had a cook-out with our kids and their friends.  I don't know why they keep inviting us, except maybe because we are the only ones with a garden so we always bring vegetables.  Whatever the reason we always enjoy the companionship and great food. 

Tonight as we sat around the table the conversation turned to the antics they had gotten into as teenagers.  I stated that as much as I caught onto, the real jolts were the confessions that came about the things I hadn't figured out.  "Frankly", I said, "if I didn't know about it then, I really don't want to know about it now".  One of my son's neighbors turned to me and said that he knew exactly how I felt.  He said that growing up he just loved a cookie his mom made called sunshine bars.  Every chance he got he would ask for these treats.  They were his birthday choice and for all special occasions.  His mother made them with pumpkin and he just loved them.  In fact, he said that he never wanted to carve his pumpkin at Halloween because he wanted her to be able to cook the pulp for sunshine bars. 

Then one night when they were all sitting around telling stories, as us old folks do, his mother said she had a confession to make.  She said that all those sunshine bars made with pumpkin were actually made with sweet potatoes.  The young man was devastated.  "I hate sweet potatoes!" he wailed.  "I would never have eaten them if I'd known they were made with sweet potatoes".  She just smiled and said "I know."

He said that the thing that really got to him was all the years she had lied to him and told him they were pumpkin.  He said he wondered what on earth she had done with all the Halloween pumpkins he had carefully saved.  And what about all the cans of pumpkin he had talked her into buying so he could have his sunshine bars.  Was there a secret room in his house filled with cans of pumpkin?  How could she just keep telling him they were pumpkin?

We all laughed and enjoyed the story.  However, underneath it all there was an undercurrent of truth.  Mom's aren't supposed to lie.  They are the one person you can always count on to tell you the truth.  It left a sinking sensation in his heart to realize that his mom had lied to him.  I had to stifle a chuckle of my own.  Kids never think that a little evasion of the truth to their parents is a bad thing.  In fact my kids love to brag about the times they "put one over" on us.  However this time, Mom, got a little payback of her own.

You go girl!