Gumball Machine

Use to be, that a quarter was a lot of money.  Time was that every grocery store had a bevy of candy machines just inside the automatic doors.  The one with the largest gumballs cost 25 cents.  A multicolor collage of circular confections calling to children as they were dragged into the grocery store.  Chores usually got me there.  A dime here, a nickel there, for one thing or another, like pulling weeds.  My favorite.  So you would put your money into the slot and turn the key.  A clicking and scraping would be illicited from the bowls of the glass fronted container.  The whole level of gumballs would rise before dropping one down the shoot.  If you weren't ready when you opened the metal flap to retrieve the golf ball size gum orb, it would escape to the floor.  Not withstanding whatever process made and sent the gumballs to the distributor, or the persons hands that put it in the machine, the floor under the machines that was impossible to clean and the inevitable roll across the foot traffic covered floor, the five second rule was never applied because of the hard candy coating repelling any and all germs or microbes.  Then, in it went.  A bulging tumor in one cheek or the other.  Doubly hard since it had been drying for months in the machine without a wrapper.  Always got the cinnamon flavor that burned for the full five minutes it took to relieve the confection of all its sugar and subsequent flavor.  The best 25 cent experience ever.