The ramblings and observations of a recent kidney transplant recipient, although not necessarily for that reason.

>omething you may or may not know about me is that my office is located in my parents’ house.  I run a small business with my father and when I go to work, I go to my parents’ house.  Yesterday my nephew, Scotty, came over for a little while after school.  He needed a place to go in between school and catechism, so he came here.  He sat and watched cartoon TV while I worked.

During one of my bathroom breaks, as I was walking by the living room, I stopped to ask him if he needed anything.   Something to drink, maybe?  He looked up and gave me some cross between a shrug and a half-nod that I took as a “yes”.  The thing is….I don’t really know what my parents keep around the house to drink.  I only drink water when I’m there, so I don’t pay too much attention to what else is in the refrigerator.  I know Scotty’s first choice would be regular Coke, but I know for a fact that my mom doesn’t keep that around and I know it because that is my guilty pleasure drink of choice and she refuses to contribute to my obesity by keeping regular Coke around.

So I offer…”Umm….I think Grandma has sugar free lemonade?  or Gatorate?  Do you like Gatorade?” I get back a response that is a half-shrug, half-head shake, with a smile(?)…that I misinterpret as a “yes”.  “You do like Gatorade?”, I ask to reconfirm, to which I finally get an absolute negative response to.  No to Gatorade.  Scottie then asks me, “Can I have a diet root beer?”. This is something that for me comes right out of left field.  I don’t think my mother has ever had diet root beer in the house and I also find it odd that my die-hard-classic-coke-drinking nephew would even want one in the first place.

I respond, “Scotty, I don’t think Grandma keeps diet root beer around.”  To which, Scotty gets up off the couch, walks himself into the kitchen, pulls a diet root beer out of the fridge, and walks back to the living room to resume his TV watching and soda drinking.  No thanks to me for misinforming him of his choices.

Then I ponder.  How weird is it that Scotty knew exactly what Grandma kept to drink that he liked and he’s here maybe once a week, while I am here practically everyday and am so unaware that the refrigerator had (actually it was full of) something it I don’t like, so my brain just skips over it the fourteen times a day I peek into the fridge for a snack or a drink.  But then I thought it made sense.  I remember going to my grandmother’s house once a week and I remember that she kept things around that only I would eat.  Every week I would go and the foods and drinks that I would like at her house will have only changed by the amounts I’d eaten on my previous visit.  I’m sure that she did the same thing for all of her grand kids and I just missed it at the time, having been so selfish and focused on only the things in her house that I cared about.

Did your grandmother (grandfather? aunt? uncle?) keep things around their house that only you would eat when you visited?

My grandmother kept for me:

Coke
Cream Cheese and Worcester to make cracker dip
All fixings for Creamed Tuna On Toast
Cake Frosting (straight out of the can)
Licorice
and believe it or not, pickled herring (I was a weird kid, and a Swedish one, apparently)