To help out bloggers, Ben Huberman at WordPress has reopened the Discover challenges. Each day, for April 2020, a Discover challenge is going up first thing in the morning. Today’s challenge is the subject “dish.”
Funny, I think of “dishing it,” giving dirt.
What Huberman means is food. In high school, I took Tuesday noon hours at my grandparents’ house, that is, the house of my mother’s parents. Each Tuesday I went for a grilled cheese sandwich, a glass of chocolate milk, and a candy bar.
My grandmother and I would sit at her kitchen table, with the company of the dog, a black Schnauzer named Ebony, and my grandfather emerging from the rec room in the basement to grab his lunch and take it back down, to where he could watch TV. A charmed life.
It’s a powerful memory because a meal like that, though simple, got me out of the high school mindset, and into a family role. Other days of the week, I’d sit in the cafeteria to eat, and then make my way into the school library, perhaps, or to one of the classrooms.
My grandmother enjoyed seeing me. She felt I was brilliant. My grandparents were getting on in years, so evenings for them meant watching television themselves.
I think we sometimes talked about the kind of thing we were watching. I didn’t mind. I liked the dog.
It was energetic and friendly and enjoyed the scraps. Maybe more time inside the high school would have been better, and maybe less time, too.
The time went fast, as time often seems to. I personally think I was terrible, nurturing the wrong interests and similarly foolish pursuits.
If I could relive those years, I’d do things differently. Hindsight is 20/20.
I visited my grandmother every week, for years to come. Even in her senior years, she was a lively old lady about who people cared.
I am glad I didn’t do worse in life, denigrating the family line. She bid me not to worry.
When asked to address a “dish,” my grandma’s grilled cheese plate is what I remember. I was glad for it every week.