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Individually Wrapped -- With Love
By Greg Downs
And I also know we didn't go back inside until all 10 peanut butter cup wrappers were scattered on the porch around us. That was our agreement.
"Oh," my grandfather would say and clap himself on his stomach. "I ate too much." But he didn't mean it. Once we returned inside, he fixed plates of green beans and mashed potatoes for my mother and for me and for himself. Once, I ate so much that I waddled back to his garden and vomited.
"You all right?" he asked when I waddled back inside. I nodded. "Then take some more," he said. He handed me a fresh plate.
My grandfather was a fairly plain man. What he loved, he loved too much. His garden. His two children. His food. His oldest grandson. He had occupied himself with a long list of jobs -- as a monument carver and an insurance salesman and a security guard. Except when he was telling a story, he often looked sad, and a little distant from the world around him. Not surprisingly, given the way he ate, he had great big jowls that made him look a little like a basset hound. When my mother and my uncle spoke of him, they talked about his kindness and his simplicity.
All of that true, but my grandfather was also a magician. Somehow he had taken mass-produced products like Chee-Tos and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and transformed them into something that only we shared. They belonged to the two of us, and no advertising or labels could convince me otherwise.
After I turned 6 we moved to Hawaii, about as far away from Jeffersontown, Kentucky as I could imagine, and I only saw my grandfather on holidays. The first time back, I worried that he wouldn't remember, but we went through the same routine. He pretended not to notice me; I tore up his house looking for the snacks; we sat outside on the porch.
When I was 12, we moved bac to Kentucky and things stayed pretty much the same, until he suffered a heart attack. He was 75 years old, had never been less than 50 pounds overweight and smoked too much, so no one was surprised. For a few weeks, he stayed alive in the Intensive Care Unit. My mother and I visited him, but he could barely remember who we were. A few days later he died.