I came across a curious display at the local drugstore: Flicks chocolate candy.

I haven’t seen these since the early 1970’s when I was little boy. I often played with my candy before eating them and Flicks did double duty. After coming home from the grocery store with my mother, I would go to the end table in the living room, open the wrapper at the end of the tube, dump the chocolate drops out and count each piece out aloud. If I didn’t know what the next number should be, my mother would count off of her fingers to help me along. After I ate all the chocolate, I took the wrapper off the cardboard tube and used it as a “telescope” for my imagination.

At some point I stopped eating Flicks and started eating M&M’s, sorting and counting the colors. Along the way Flicks disappeared from the store shelves entirely. According the company’s website, Flicks stopped making the candy in 1989 after the 100-year-old production equipment was damaged when moving to a new city. A new owner acquired the recipe and brand in 2004, and painstakingly reconstructed the original machinery to produce Flicks chocolate candy in 2005.

What’s the new Flicks chocolate candy like in the 21st century?

The biggest change was the packaging. Before you could open the wrapper at the end of the tube and spill out the chocolate drops. Not with today’s food safety regulations. The chocolate drops are now in a plastic bag. That killed half of my childhood memories when I opened the new Flicks. As for the chocolate drops, they still melted in my mouth and tasted the same as I had remembered from all those years ago.

Alas, the display bin is dwindling down to nothing after being available for a month. I doubt that the drugstore will stocked them with the regular candies. For a brief moment, I found and lost my childhood again.