Oxymoron

Oxymoron (ox-y-mo’-ron): Placing two ordinarily opposing terms adjacent to one another. A compressed paradox.

My “Cold Hots” were a total failure. I envisioned them when I was little, growing up in Foster’s Creek, New Jersey which had a Foster Freeze factory that employed the whole town, including my dad. He’d come home smelling like ice cream with a bucket of vanilla ice cream on his arm. It was his daily ration—a token of goodwill from Foster’s. After 20 years of faithful service employees were granted one bucket per day. Dad had just achieved the twenty year mark and we were reveling in the ice cream. Some days we’d have ice cream for dinner. Mom would make it into soup—boiling in carrots, potatoes, and on special occasions, raccoon or rabbit Dad picked up off the side of the road on his weekly “hunting trips” on Rte. 10. They were always fresh and delicious. Dad would say “The nose knows” and laugh so hard snot would come out his nose. Then, we’d all laugh, for like ten minutes, until we couldn’t breathe! Sometimes we had to give Dad CPR to get hm up and running again. Mom always took charge of that. She had taken first aid at Farley Gibbins Middle School as part of her adult improvement regime. Her wood-shop skills came in handy when the front porch collapsed due to a carpenter ant infestation. She exterminated the ants with a bunch of spray cans of ant killer—it gave my little brother Jolly a rash that comes and goes, and a crooked leg, As mom said “It goes with the turf.” She rebuilt the parch out of used pallet boards—sturdy oak that will last forever. There were some stray gaps between the boards. You just had to watch out, or you’d fall through. Our mailman got his foot stuck. Now we are required to put a mail box at the end of the sidewalk. Mom says, “No big deal, he’s a wimp.” I agree—a disgrace to the uniform.

I am working on a new candy called “Chewy Rocks.” It is gooey chrunchtastic—like broken glass mixed with honey. I drool every time I think of it. The “rock” will be candy rocks. They will look like granite pebbles. They will be injected with fruit flavored chewing gum. The box will have a picture of my brother Jolly with his crutch on the cover wearing a toga and sunglasses with his fist raised, signifying how “Chewy Rocks” make him optimistic about his “hopeless future.” He is endlessly bitter about the “accident” and threatens to kill Mom at least twice a week. Mom says he’s been threatening since he was eight “and it’s not going to happen now. He’s a wimp.”

So, some little candy sho up in Maine is suing me for infringing on their patent for “Stone Candy.” So, I backed off of ”Chewy Rocks.” But don’t worry. I’ve got another idea: “Weightless Gravity: The Flying Beer.” It comes in an airplane–shaped can with the pilot waving out the window. When you empty it, you can throw it and it glides.

Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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