MEMORY IS A GOOD REMEDY

Sometimes, even I learn. For instance, at the end of the last year, the last three days of it was spent with heartburn. It stayed with me each day, and when I ate, it would rise to new levels. If I had a drink, it would ask me if I was crazy. Yes, I had talking heartburn, it was persistent and grueling as it took its toll on my enthusiasm to eat all the great holiday foods I love so much.

Not to harp on the diet, but now that I’m on it, I am reminding myself that there is a price to pay if I don’t watch out. I think of the discomfort of heartburn, how it felt and I get over any minor plan I may have to deviate. It is somewhat like having to listen to your Mother after you ate her cheesecake for a bake sale, you really rather be elsewhere, say a dentists chair, as he does his rendition of root canal work.

I’m not always so thoughtful, I can still screw up, and I do on occasion. As long as I don’t drag anyone else into the screw-ups, I’m OK with it. However, even that isn’t always the case. For instance: many years ago.

It all started on a Saturday morning: I was a pre-teen, living in my Parents house and my parents were out shopping for food. My older sister Theresa (much older) was asleep in her bed, and I was hungry. I searched the closets and cupboards for something to eat and finally found a box of cookies. The problem with the cookies was that they were “For the kids” my three younger sisters. Being how Theresa my older sister (much older) had ratted me out about some minor infraction that I committed, and was threatened to be sent to reform school for by my Mother, I decided to kill two birds with one stone.

The box of cookies were an unopened box, sealed tightly, almost tamper proof. As I always say: “hunger is the mother of invention and improvisation. (I always walk around saying that, maybe two or three times a day.) I went into the kitchen drawer and retrieved a butter knife and gently applied it ever so carefully to the glue that kept the flaps together. Like a surgeon, I slipped the knife along the glue, careful not to rip the top of the box and plied it open. It was a clean job!

Helping myself to a handful of cookies, I could hear my Mother yelling at me for that minor infraction that I had committed, and remembering the sleeping stool pigeon (much older) I got my revenge! Both cookies and revenge were sweet!

I took one more cookie out of the box, slipped quietly into the sleeping Madonna’s room and broke it into tiny little crumbs, on her bed. I resealed the cookie box and returned it on the shelf.

Mom and Dad return, Mom starts putting away the groceries, she picks up the cookie box that I tampered with and noticed the box was lighter than she could ever recall a box of cookies being. Immediately she launched an investigation. She calls #1 Suspect, and I respond to her verbal subpoena.

Mom: “Do you happen to know why this box of unopened cookies is so light?”

Me: “Gee, no!”

Mom: “Then why do I smell a rat?”

Me: “Hmmm… why don’t you ask Theresa, why me all the time?”

Mom: “ OK, I will.”

Mom continues her investigation and marches into the sleeping Dahlia’s (much older) room and sees the cookie crumbs and lets out a howl that sends sister (much older) through the stratosphere.

Mom: “Did you take the kids cookies?”

Tess: “Me, no, he did.”

Mom: Don’t lie to me, he would never open a box like that, he would rip it open.”

So you see Dear Reader, memory served me well. I remembered how I usually open a box of cookies, and also who rats my out. Revenge AND cookies were sweet.