One of my earliest memories is playing around a garbage heap outside our house in Kansas City, Missouri, where my sister (and brilliant author) Leslie P. Garcia was born. Since Leslie was just a baby, I must have been around two-and-a-half at the time. I discovered a delicious mystery—an old piece of furniture that hid colorful delights.
These amazing brightly colored sweet things had a brown center. I didn’t know at the time that the center was called chocolate. I couldn’t read the letter on the brightly colored shell—I wasn’t even three yet. I found these things stuck in the sofa that was sitting on the pile of trash waiting for removal. Day after day, I rushed outside to play as quickly as possible in the morning. While Mom looked after my baby sister, I explored that old couch searching for remaining mystery treats in the crevasses and eating them with relish.
Mom didn’t have a sweet tooth. To her, children ate fruit—not candy or cookies. She never bought candy. When she bought cookies they were vanilla wafers or graham crackers. Mom didn’t like chocolate, so they were never chocolate.
When the trash heap—including the sofa—was scooped up and taken away, I was inconsolable and Mom couldn’t understand why. “But why should you be upset about them taking away that old couch?” she scolded. “I told you to stay away from that rubbish heap and to quit playing on broken furniture.”
Memories are strange critters. Often, an image of that old brown couch with its hidden candy stash creeps into my mind and I can even smell that garbage pile smell of rotten oranges. Without realizing it, that memory must have been partly responsible for the main character in my first book, “Bridge to Nowhere.” Texas Miz Mike plays a secret M&M game where she separates Mike and Marty M&Ms out of the bowl she keeps on her office desk, and in idle moments—she marches them down the church aisle to get married.
“Bridge to Nowhere” now has 36 ratings and an average of 4.3. One of its first reviewers enjoyed the book so much that she sent a box of chocolate—including M&Ms—to me at Christmas.
The success of Bridge to Nowhere galvanized my writing. I now have 46 published titles, one at the editor’s waiting for final approval, and another that is nearly finished. And to think that hidden mystery candy in the crevasses of an old sofa may have ignited the process.
There is another reason the memory of those stashed M&Ms tickles my memory. The sofa was on a trash heap. It was old, dirty, and smelly. Yet I dug the candy out of it and ate it because I didn’t know any better. I didn’t know about germs. I didn’t know that what I was doing could hurt me. The candy was delicious, so I ate it.
Whenever I see another person doing something wrong or foolish—I remember the candy I ate because I didn’t know any better. Sometimes folks don’t want to follow after sin or foolishness—they just don’t know any better, and what they are doing is delicious. They don’t need judgment. They need grace. They need love and a good example. At some point and time in our lives we have all been untaught.
“The excellence of knowledge is that wisdom gives life to those who have it.” Ecclesiastes 7:12.
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“Write what you know,” the weathered writing instructor with grey-streaked red hair and periwinkle glasses told us, holding up two lackluster books that had probably not sold more than 30 copies each. Still, her two-day class was cheap, and at 20-something with a gathering stack of rejection slips, I figured some knowledge was better than no knowledge.
Stephanie Parker McKean 