Several months ago, Ti Ti, my granddaughter, asked me to send her a picture of me. Instead of a single photo, I sent two of me as a toddler. Then, I got into the routine of sending Ti Ti more pictures. The second was when I graduated from high school and my prom date. The third set had to do with a snowman and me.

Like the others, this essay has to do with Ti Ti’s PaPa Al. The first photo is of me with a pretzel. My parents treated me to a huge pretzel when I was around four. Apparently, it was a happy day for me. I had the entire pretzel to myself.

This photo was taken on our front porch on Whitman Terrace in Merchantville, NJ. A couple of years later, we moved to Norwood Ave. in Pennsauken, where I attended Collins Tract Elementary School. Ti Ti is probably wondering what’s with all these details. Well, Ti Ti, it has to do with pretzels.

Look at my happy face with my pretzel. Four years later, people were getting ready for Christmas. A month later, I would be nine. I spent a couple of weeks working at Aunt Charlotte's candy store in Merchantville, NJ. Brooks Oakford owned Aunt Charlette’s. Back then, everyone called him Bud. He was my cousin.

Bud asked me whether I would help him as the store prepared for Christmas. I don’t remember what I got for Christmas that year, but my best gift was helping Bud. I felt like the kid in the proverbial candy store. They made all sorts of candy and ice cream. As I worked, I could see, smell, and sample everything.

However, I loved working on the chocolate coating machine the most of all my various tasks. I would sit at the end of the long conveyor belt and would place pretzels on the moving belt. Then, the belt would move through the coating process. By the time the pretzel reached the end of the conveyor belt, someone would remove the pretzel and box them. This is what the coating machine did.

However, it took me until college before I understood Bud’s gift. I thought that working in a candy store was the gift. I missed Bud’s more significant gift. Bud saw something in me and acted upon it. He trusted me around large machinery and believed I could do the job without getting hurt.

Bud showed me the coating machine I used a lifetime ago. Talk about being back memories.

I took Bud and Bunny, his wife, and his four daughters to a local restaurant a dozen years ago. During our meal, I thanked Bud for believing in me. His gift radically changed my mindset, even though I didn’t realize it then.

My awakening to Bud’s gift occurred when I went to Muskingum College from 1961-65. In my junior year at Muskingum College, there was a required 10-hour class, which you could take either as a junior or senior year. The class was called The Arts. Louie Palmer was the professor. I took the class in my junior year. While I got a B in the class, I didn’t ace it.

Nonetheless, Louie saw something in me. At the end of the second semester, he called me into his office. Louie asked me to be his teaching assistant during my senior year. I taught several subsections weekly and wrote and graded the midterms and finals for both semesters during my senior year. I got Louie’s message of believing in me. It didn’t take long before I realized Bud had done the same thing for me.

The final photo for Ti Ti is my senior class photo at Muskingum. Ti Ti will say I haven’t changed much over the last six decades.

At this end of my journey down the yellow brick road of life, I am still coating pretzels with chocolate.

In closing, my suggestion to my readers is to teach someone how to coat pretzels with chocolate. Bud’s teaching changed my life.