Kathy Krause’s personal essay “The Hershey Bar Incident” entertains as well as reminds readers of something very important–how many times as adults we make promises to children and then don’t come through, thus eroding the admiration the children have for us and leaving more hurt behind than we willingly acknowledge. Kathy’s well-drawn descriptions of what it feels like to admire and idealize a teacher and her clearly written narration of the Hershey bar incident keep her readers grounded in the time period of her girlhood. Well-chosen details express the young girl’s feelings and evoke the world as it was then for her, allowing us to inhabit that world as well. Delightfully, the essay starts not with the main incident, but with one that occurred two years earlier, one that the adult author can see was a first lesson in loss, though a slightly different kind of loss than in the Hershey bar incident, which involves first lessons about the untrustworthiness of adults rather than merely lessons about the fact that they can’t fix everything. These lessons are the underpinnings of the deeper meaning of Kathy’s essay and they ignite emotion in readers, who can see the meaning from the side of the child and that of the adult.

I admire the way the adult voice is threaded through the essay evaluating the experience but in such an unobtrusive way that the reader can also be present with the young girl. I also very much admire the short, pithy ending line, which sums up the essay’s biggest lesson without making any concessions.

The Hershey Bar Incident
by Kathy Krause

At the very tender age of three, when I watched the tiny, precious, innermost fish of my nesting fish toy drift lazily down the drain of my Grandma’s bathtub, I discovered the concept of irrevocable loss. One minute it was there, safe within the five other nesting fish, part of my everyday life, and the next minute it was gone. All my tears and Grandpa’s pipe wrench couldn’t bring it back. Never before in my life had anything been gone for good. Daddy was gone to work sometimes, and that was worrisome enough, but he did always come back. What if someday he was gone for good, too? From then on, I was on the lookout for other sneaky ways the hand of fate could slide up and pick my pocket, making away with something I loved.

What I have come to call The Hershey Bar Incident happened in Kindergarten. My story begins happily enough — I loved everything about Kindergarten from the get-go. The smell of the ammonia used to clean the windows. The slick squeak my hands made on the blond laminate of the desktops. The waxy feel of the big, flat-sided, no-roll crayons; and the cloth-like texture of the coarse manila drawing paper on which we produced our stick-figure family portraits. All so new, fresh, and ready. But the best part of Kindergarten was the teacher.

 I suppose she might have looked out over her class that September in 1965 and thought of us in similar terms — new, fresh, and ready — but I doubt it. Mrs. Nicewander was an unsentimental veteran of many years of Kindergarten and had raised children of her own. She radiated calmness and competence. I don’t ever remember her smiling, but then I don’t ever remember her frowning, either. In every way she was perfect.

Nothing seemed to faze her. The walls of flame through which a Kindergarten teacher must walk on a daily basis did not singe her cool composure. On the very first day, a panicked Kindergartener slipped out of the classroom and ran halfway home before he was caught and returned, trembling and miserable, to Room 4. Mrs. Nicewander seemed completely unruffled. Her voice was steady and firm as she reminded us all that it was very dangerous to run away, and that if we ever ran out into the street and got hit by a car, there would be nothing left of us but a grease spot. (This image struck me so forcibly that it was years before I wondered how a human child, full of bones and blood and stuff, could be turned so neatly into grease. And I certainly began to consider the grease spot on our driveway in a different light.)

Invariably and through all the tumult of five-year-old anxiety, mischief, and tears, Mrs. Nicewander was a steady beacon, guiding us through the treacherous waters of half-day public school. I trusted and loved her absolutely.

One morning Mrs. Nicewander made a momentous proclamation.

“Boys and girls, I have an announcement to make.” She paused until our voices stilled and our eyes were on her. In the rustling attention she dropped her bombshell: “My daughter is getting married. Her engagement notice will be in the newspaper tonight. Every child who cuts out the picture and brings it in to me tomorrow will get a Hershey bar.”

The effect of this pronouncement on the class must have been immediate and clamorous, but I have no memory of it. My focus turned inward so quickly I got tunnel vision and nearly lost consciousness altogether. I gripped the edge of my desk, cleared my head, and got busy trying to work out what this incredible development could mean to me.

You must understand what it was like for a five-year-old to be offered an opportunity of this magnitude. As adults, we take for granted how easy it is to satisfy our whims. If we want a chocolate bar, all we have to do is pick one up as we’re heading out through the checkout line at the grocery store. A moment’s thought, a minimal effort, and some pocket change. The Hershey bar is ours.

But at five, I lacked everything necessary to achieve this goal: means, opportunity, and permission. My allowance was 10¢ a week, and 5¢ of it had to go in the offertory envelope at St. Boniface. I rarely had more than a nickel in my moneybox, and at the time, a Hershey bar was 7¢. So means were seriously limited.

Then there was the question of opportunity. How often did I go to the grocery store? Mom went once a week, on Saturday morning, and each week she took just one of her children. I had two brothers, which meant that I went to Kroger’s with Mom only once every three weeks. Opportunity was limited, for sure.

But I could have gone every day and it wouldn’t have helped. Mom would never have let me buy candy at the grocery store. We couldn’t even get sugar cereal. My mother was disgustingly ahead of her time on the subject of childhood nutrition.

In my everyday life, I knew that there was no chance, with means, opportunity, and permission all denied. The only thing I could do was wait and hope that some preternaturally insightful grown-up, somewhere, sometime in my life, would happen to glance at my quiet countenance and be struck suddenly by the inspiration that this little girl would LOVE a chocolate bar.

But here — it had happened! My beloved teacher, Mrs. Nicewander, had actually offered us free chocolate. Just for cutting out some engorgo-thingy from the newspaper! My family gets the newspaper! I could do this!

I thought about nothing else all day. When school was over, I ran home and tried to explain to my mother what was needed. Luckily, she knew all about engagements, and how notices and pictures often appeared in newspapers. She even understood about how sometimes people liked to cut these out and get lots of copies of the same one, particularly if they are mothers of the brides-to-be. If she had concerns about a Kindergarten teacher deliberately distributing teeth-rotting substances to known chocolate abusers, she wisely did not share them with me.

I gave her no peace that afternoon as we waited for the paper boy to deliver the afternoon edition, and then as we waited for Dad to finish reading the Local section. Finally, finally! the paper was mine. I had to have my mother do the cutting, to make sure I didn’t mess it up and ruin my only chance for a Hershey bar. She cut it perfectly and folded it into an envelope to be taken in my coat pocket to school the next day.

Morning finally came, and I tripped off to school with a light heart. I don’t know how I managed to pay attention at all that day. Mrs. Nicewander was a sensible lady, and though her pupils agitated most strenuously, she did not give out the Hershey bars until the very end of the day.

“Now, will everyone who has brought in the newspaper clipping please line up at my desk. Quietly!” She sat in her teacher chair, opened the right-hand desk drawer, and brought out a big brown grocery sack. We lined up more quietly and quickly than we ever had before, each of us clutching our precious ticket to glory. In the soft rustle of 25 newspaper clippings, the excitement was palpable.

It was a simple process. Mrs. Nicewander took the clipping from each child, put it on the growing pile on the desk in front of her, and placed a whole, entire Hershey bar — foil wrapped as they were in those days, for freshness, and finished with the distinctive silver-on-chocolate-brown HERSHEY’S wrapper — in the eager small hands. Oh, I could almost feel it myself, as I watched those ahead of me get theirs — the heft of it, the solid, pristine wholeness of it. And the unimaginable bounty of that endless trove of chocolate glory in the grocery bag on the desk.

Except….

“Oh dear,” Mrs. Nicewander said as I stepped up for my turn. She lifted the bag and peered in. “I didn’t think so many of you would bring the clippings in.” She took my clipping and looked at me. “I’ll bring you a Hershey bar after my next grocery trip. I promise.”

Oh, do I need to describe it to you, dear reader? My heart teetered on the brink of devastation. The taste of creamy sweetness that I had imagined on my tongue turned to ash. I struggled to force down that lump in my throat, and did not cry. It was no testament to my own inner strength, or to some as-yet unrealized acceptance of the unfairness of life, or more prosaically of how our culture often treats the last in line. No, it was a measure of my trust in Mrs. Nicewander. I have said that I trusted and loved her absolutely, and this was true. But my love for chocolate was primal, and my loyalty was sorely tested.

Every day that week I went to school hoping that Mrs. Nicewander had gone to the grocery store the night before. At the end of the week I ventured to ask her whether she had perhaps had a chance…

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said sincerely, “I do need to get that for you, don’t I?”

I never asked her again. Grown-ups had their reasons for doing or not doing things, and they were mysteriously grumpy if you asked them something several times. I knew she would remember. I absolutely believed that she could not see me every day, could not look at my hopeful, freckled face as she asked me to come to the chalkboard and write the letter of the day or change the weather picture from Sunny to Cloudy, and miss the silent plea. I knew she would someday see what, with all my heart and soul, I put into my eyes: “I’m one chocolate bar down.”

But she never did. The weeks went by. The school year ended, and still I waited, patiently, still believing.

The next year I was in first grade. I would see Mrs. Nicewander in the halls sometimes, and I always smiled at her, every time hoping against hope that she would stop in her tracks, smack her hand to her forehead and say, “You’re the little girl that I owe that Hershey bar to, aren’t you?” But she never did.

First grade went by, and second. When I was in third grade, Mrs. Nicewander retired. In fourth grade we moved across town and I went to a different school, in a different school district entirely.

Still — and, I was beginning to realize, forever — I was one chocolate bar down.

Is this why I still crave chocolate so much? Is this why, when I was nine, I was so extraordinarily, over-the-top angry when I caught my four-year-old brother sneaking nibbles of the chocolate bar I won at a birthday party? Is this why I snuck away from the other grandkids at my grandma’s at Christmas and gorged myself on Hershey’s Kisses, hiding the foil-wrapper evidence behind the credenza under the cuckoo clock?

Now, to be honest, I have worked this story to my advantage for years. People hear my sad tale, and bars of chocolate appear in my mailbox, in my briefcase, at my desk. I get a box of Godivas from my kids for my birthday each year. It is gratifying, much appreciated, and completely delicious.

But there is no way I or anyone can go back to 1965 and put that Hershey bar into that five-year-old’s hands. There is not enough chocolate in the world to make up for that broken promise.

Mrs. Nicewander owes me a Mercedes.