Candy Land is a cruel game.
Masked in sugary rainbow joy colors with sinister smiling denizens populating its simple carbohydrate forests — it’s a trap.
Oh, let’s learn colors. Let’s count. Let’s follow RULES together.
No.
When a four-year-old gets two-thirds of the way to the castle and draws that go-back-to-popsicle-purgatory card, the only result is abject wailing.
And if Daddy draws 2-purple-squares after that, nudging him closer to the syrup throne, wailing turns to candy apple blood vengeance.
Yesterday morning, Jude was so offended by the whims of the Candy Land fates, he swept my blue plastic piece from its spot and zoomed his little green child across the board straight to the candy castle.
“Jude, that’s not how you play it,” I explained with utter futility.
I even reviewed the new word we’d learned the night before reading Prince Caspian: Usurper! In received pronunciation, of course.
Equally fruitless.
By this time, the older brother was witnessing the injustice happening at the whims the Candy Land gods, and he vowed, “I will WIN Candy Land for you, Jude! I’m good at this game!”
While this brotherly solidarity made my heart happy (”Callaways stick together!” we always say), I felt it important to let Noah in on an important truth:
You can’t be good at Candy Land.
Noah’s eyes communicated a paradigm shift cracking open in his noggin. “What?”
“Candy Land is about what card you draw. It teaches you to count AND TO FOLLOW RULES,” I said, for Jude’s benefit of course. (I’m sure he heard me.)
I drew the next card as my little plastic avatar stood at the castle’s peppermint portcullis. It was a mystery chocolate truffle that sent me back to the very beginning of the journey.
“See? Now I have to go all the way back. That’s how this game works,” I explained.
I expected “Ooooh, okay.”
Instead, I got, “Seize the castle while our enemy languishes in the candy floss swamps!”
Luckily, for all of us (because luck is all Candy Land is about — luck and sobbing), Noah vanquished me fair and square by the cards’ oracular proclamations, and he was thus able to find satisfaction for his brother’s earlier demise.
Later that day, we got behind a school bus. It couldn’t make a tricky right-immediate-left situation happen because the Accords and RAV-4s weren’t gonna let big yellow in front of them.
The bus had to do an around-my-ass-to-get-to-my-elbow maneuver to get to where he was going (we ended up following it), and Noah asked, “Why weren’t the people letting him in?”
“Well, buddy,” I said, “driving is like a game of Candy Land. You never know what fellow motorists you’re going to draw.”
And just like Jude, if you showed me a way to slide directly to the castle when the squeezy roads of Framingham slow to molasses-miles-an-hour, I’d take it.
There’s something in here about the Candy Land cards you’re dealt and being a good sport and a gracious winner and rolling with the munches ?, but for now let’s just do our best to count out our spaces on the board with kindness.
And take popcorn breaks as necessary.
Love much.