Candy and me? It’s complicated.

Dad was a dentist, and in our home, eating sugar was right up there with ingesting arsenic, and yet Mom bribed me into swimming lessons — or, as I came to regard them, weekly near-drowning experiences — with malted milk balls.

To this day, stepping into a candy store feels somewhat illicit. It’s a fluorescently lit Fort Knox of the forbidden; I’m a raider of the peppermint bark. And yet a shopful of sweets also feels like a refuge, a sign that I survived another trip to the deep end.

Once I cross the threshhold, I morph from adult with a mortgage (talk about being underwater!) to kid with a sweet tooth.

Since moving to Palm Beach County, I’ve been high on the bulk candy bins at Sloan’s Ice Cream. IT’SUGAR in Downtown at the Gardens, the newer kid on the Pop Rocks block, has its charms, too, including old-school candies packaged by the decade in which they were popular. (I may have been a child of the ’70s, but I prefer the ’50s bag, with its Chick-O-Stick and Boston Baked Beans.)

Lately, however, my favorite sweet-treat retreat is Walgreen’s.

The chain lacks the colorful trappings and model train of Sloan’s and the desperately blasting music of IT’SUGAR, but it gets my vote for its very lack of pretense. Plus, it carries throwback products not readily found at other drugstores or supermarkets: Chunky squares, Charleston Chews, Crows black gumdrops, those striped pastel-and-black British licorices that look more like jewelry than junk food.

While I’m cuckoo for GooGoo Clusters, my boyfriend joneses for Jujyfruits. But pretty much every visit to Walgreen’s, we reach for something different, and our deliberations about What should I get this time? are part of what’s become an almost weekly ritual that we both look forward to.

Who knew the linoleum aisles of Walgreen’s would prove fertile ground for this? A little tradition between kids-at-heart sweethearts, the kind that costs pennies but adds value to a relationship over time.

There’s nothing sweeter, or simpler.