Mealtime

Mom has always known her way around a kitchen, and that was a good thing, because Dad was kind of a picky eater. We ate home cooked, home canned, farm raised, garden gathered, food. Dad liked big meals with all the trimmings - meat, potatoes, vegetables, home baked bread, six kinds of pickles, and some sort of delicious dessert.

Unlike a lot of Minnesotans, we didn't have many hot-dishes, or things like sloppy joes, and we would have died-and gone-to-heaven to have pizza once in a while. (And that would have been the kind of pizza that came in a small box - where you mixed up the dough and added the tiny can of tomato paste - it would have been unheard of back then to buy a frozen pizza.)

Breakfast was a big meal at our house too. All of us kids knew how to fry eggs, and that was a standard. Mom would make hot cereals, cooked on the stove. (The kind where you add hot water to oatmeal in a little pouch had not been invented yet. Or more correctly, it actually had been - it simply came in a bigger box, and you had to measure it out into the pan...) She would make sausage and gravy, bacon and pancakes. Or a giant pot of homemade hot chocolate. We couldn't have coffee, but we could have hot chocolate.

On weekdays, Dad got up long before we kids, so he could drive to his job in Brainerd. But on weekends when we were all there for breakfast, Dad would always let us dip our peanut butter toast into his cup of coffee. He ate his toast the same way.

It has recently occurred to me that his coffee cup must have been half full of soggy toast crumbs, not to mention the germs from the hands of all us grubby little children. He never said anything about it - and this was a man whose dresser drawers were sorted and arranged into neat sections of socks, handkerchiefs, t-shirts, etc. We were just always welcome to dip right in to that cup of coffee.

Over the years, Dad and Mom have had to adjust their eating, as health dictated, and age and weight, and those big home cooked meals don't happen all that often anymore.

And Dad's been eating hospital food for the past couple days. I suppose it's not too good, but I haven't heard him complain.

This afternoon, he's not feeling all that great. One of his major meds had accidentally slipped off the list, and as a consequence he's been having facial spasms, extremely painful. Between that, and some different meds they gave him to relax and eliminate some of the face pain, he's been very groggy, and shaky.

They also wouldn't give him anything to eat until someone looked at the ultrasound he had earlier, so when he could finally have something, he asked for peanut butter toast and coffee. The styrofoam coffee cup was full and he has to eat while inclined, and with a perilously shaky grip on the cup. Pat mentioned getting a lid for the cup, so it wouldn't spill so easily, but he either didn't hear her or didn't want one, as he didn't really respond to the suggestion. She went out and down the hall to the break-room and got one, and was just reaching across the bed tray to put it on the cup, when she saw why he didn't want one. He broke his peanut butter toast in half, reached up to the cup on the tray, and dipped it way down in.

Old habits sometimes just don't need breaking.