PUBLISHER’S MESSAGE

Jamoca Almond Fudge

Some of my favorite and most enduring holiday memories were made when our out-of-town family would come for a visit. And, because I had my own bedroom growing up—my two younger sisters shared a room—it went without saying that I would be the one to make the sacrifice when our guests arrived.

Preparing for my grandmother’s visit was a big deal. She always brought a lot of fun along, but I did have to psych myself up for the relocation to my parents’ bedroom floor. Grandma—she went by “Grandma Fran,” an abbreviation of our last name—did not really fit into our “early to bed, early to rise” family culture. With the volume dial pointed at “High,” she liked to stay up really late watching television well beyond the point when the broadcasts ended. Then she would read every word of the local paper with that distinctive sound of the T.V. “snow” buzzing in the background keeping her company. To this day, I’ve never heard someone read the paper as loud as Grandma Fran. Plus, she turned on every light in the house and cranked up the heater to max capacity. With the combination of the hallway lights flooding in from under the door at my eye level, and our old gas furnace gasping and clunking and chugging its way back to life every few minutes in an effort to keep pace with the thermostat, I probably would have had better luck rolling out my Coleman sleeping bag next to the train tracks down the street.

Despite the lack of quality sleep, it was a magical whirlwind when Grandma Fran was in town, and the party never stopped. My sisters and I looked forward to her visit all year long. She played board games with us, helped us transform our living room into the Millennium Falcon, took us for walks, and, best of all, she shared our passion for ice cream. Every evening during her stay after my parents returned from work, she would talk them into driving her to 31 Flavors. “You know, the kids really like ice cream,” she reasoned. Invariably, they would return with the 31st best flavor: Jamoca Almond Fudge. Don’t get me wrong, my sisters and I tried our level best to choke it down—it was ice cream after all—but Jamoca Almond Fudge? Dark chocolate, coffee, and almonds? Seriously? We were hoping for Rainbow Sherbet or Bubble Gum, and we would have gladly settled for Gold Medal Ribbon. As it turns out, Grandma didn’t need our help. Each day, as she slept deep into the mid-morning hours comfortably snuggled into my Star Wars sheets with a head full of curlers, my sisters and I would find an empty carton in the trash can strategically concealed between the “Local” and “Sports” sections of the previous day’s paper, which made us giggle to ourselves as we realized that Grandma Fran had pulled off another awe-inspiring ice cream heist.

As our out-of-town family has begun to arrive this holiday season, I found myself searching for my sweatshirt one night recently. I tip-toed into my bedroom where our ten-year-old daughter was sleeping fitfully in her purple butterfly sleeping bag on the fold-out cot next to our bed. Her two younger brothers had been crashed out for hours in their shared bedroom on the other side of the wall—they had struggled valiantly to keep their eyes open during the last hotly contested round of Candy Land. It was getting late when someone launched into one of the same old stories that I had heard at least a hundred times before. They were opening and closing cabinets and making all kinds of commotion with lights turned on that I didn’t even know we had, when somebody in the living room became caught up in a fit of uncontrollable belly laughter. As I looked up from my dresser, I could to see my daughter thrashing around in the glow pouring in from under the door, and it made me smile—the only thing that could have made me happier in that moment, I suppose, would have been a bowl of Jamoca Almond Fudge.

I would like to take this opportunity to wish you and yours a happy, healthy holiday season and a prosperous year ahead. And, to everyone who had a hand in producing this issue of SLO LIFE Magazine and, especially to our advertisers and subscribers—thank you for your support.

Live the SLO Life!

Tom Franciskovich tom@slolifemagazine.com