Tuesday, March 29, 2011

The Gall

Can I say that I hate people? I don't think that would fly since most of you are, indeed, people. But did you ever get sick of those little things that people do? I'm there. I hate people who sit and talk while their kids run amok. I hate people who take more than their share when not everyone has gotten some. I think i need six hours in a sensory-deprivation tank or maybe just a room in a hotel with a pool and a sauna.

A sauna would be nice. I like that feeling when I can feel my skin moving on it's own. I guess it's my pores opening up. It's like a tiny unison stretch, one that I don't get very often. And I like being warm, finally. One thing that I have a problem with is keeping warm. Without carbohydrates, I just can't keep warm. I even turn the shower on cold at the end like the doctor says, but I'm still freezing when I'm eating right.

So here's my problem: do I write about how hard life is when I have to eat the way I do? Nah, it's boring. Who wants to get on the computer and look at words some woman's writing about how her sciatica is acting up, her toenails are hard to reach, and she has gout.

I remember when my grandma Esther used to whine about how things hurt. She was a master at having aches and pains. And back then, we were required to stand quietly and listen whenever an adult was talking. Does anyone remember that?

Grandma Esther used to keep her kidney stones in a little brown pill bottle on the back of the stove. I remember, once, that she was using a spatula to press down the pork tenderloin patties into the bubbling grease as she talked. She stopped and grabbed the bottle and poured them out into her hand and showed me.

"Look at the size of that one," she said. "I tell you. I never hurt so bad in my life as with that stone." She acted as if she'd never told me this story before. I wondered where my brother was. How did he manage to get away?

"For a week before my surgery, I couldn't keep a thing down. Ole Doc Baker kept telling me nothing was wrong, but I knew. I just knew it was another gall stone." As she talked, she rolled those little pellets around in her hand. She held them out for me to touch, but I couldn't do it. Then, she did the worst thing I could think of doing - without washing her hands, she put the gall stones back into the bottle, capped it, unfolded the bread bag and started lining buns up on plates.

Now, I almost always had an appetite, but I couldn't eat that sandwich to save my life. After rolling around in my grandma's gut for sixty years, those gall stones, I knew, were not clean and I'm sure she'd never put them into rubbing alcohol to clean them (as if that would help with gall stones). How she got the doctor to save them for me, I don't know, but she did. People did things like that. Do they still?

My own mother told me last year that she kept my grandma's gall stones. "Seriously?" I asked her. No shit. My mother had indeed kept them. She even got them out and rolled them around in her hand as she talked. "You hungry?" she asked as she put them away, still in the little brown pill bottle. "I'm going to make me a sandwich."

I hate people.

Thank you for listening, jb

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