Take a Little Power. Louis Shalako.

Standing up to your Grandma.

Louis Shalako

Take a Little Power.

 

Why I don’t eat breakfast. I was twelve or thirteen years old. I shuffled out to the kitchen one morning. I grabbed a bowl and put some cereal in it. There was no milk in the fridge.

There was an empty jug beside the kitchen sink. And there, on the kitchen table, was a bowl, three-quarters full of milk, three soggy Cheerios floating in it, and when I lifted the spoon out of it, a kind of syrupy goo from all the sugar Cisco had put on his cereal. There was no way in Hades that I was going to use that milk, ladies and gentlemen. Cisco was the one who ate six out of every seven bananas in the house, to the extent that my little sister got one, and the rest of us were wondering where all the bananas had gone.

Here’s a funny thing. It’s mind over matter. If I don’t mind, it don’t matter—and this is one way of taking back the power.

If I want breakfast, I’ll go somewhere and get myself a nice plate of bacon and eggs, home fries, toast, coffee, jam or peanut butter. The table will be clean, the service fast and friendly, and I don’t have to do your dishes as well as mine.

Why I refuse to eat cake. It was Thanksgiving dinner, with roast turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and all the trimmings. Ten or twelve people gathered around the dining room table.

When it was time for dessert, my maternal grandmother Blanche asked if I wanted cake and ice cream.

Pretty full after a couple of good servings, I figured I could handle a little ice cream.

“Oh, but you’ve got to have cake and ice cream.”

“No, thank you,” I said.

“What?”

“No, thank you.”

My brother would have taken it, who wouldn’t, and maybe even left a good portion, sort of ruined in terms of leftover cake. My sister might have refused the peas, sweet potatoes, or the beets and maybe had a little more room for it.

Here is a ten year-old kid, taking back a little bit of the power from his grandmother—and she was a grand old lady. She’d taught eight grades under one roof in Enniskillen Township, and when one of those big hulking farm-boys acted up, she’d keep them after school and they would be politely requested to chop a little wood for the stove. She started teaching, a mere slip of a girl, about 22, not standing more than five-foot-six. She could handle herself well enough. She had all the power, after all.

It was a real achievement, to have it my way—or the highway. She might have even been impressed.

***

We were teenagers. One of the things I learned as a teenager, was that if half a dozen kids in someone’s family station wagon wanted cheeseburgers and fries, and there was one lone holdout for fried chicken, the stronger personality wins. I don’t mind fried chicken, it’s only a little more expensive. What really hurts is when you all have to chip in and lend them the money—

It’s better than going hungry.

What is really interesting is when you have made the observation, and learned something from it. What if it was you that suggested fried chicken? Or a pizza, or fries under the bridge. And what if all you really wanted was cheeseburgers.

What if those other kids were nothing if not suggestible. What if the stubborn holdout is just messing with their heads, or maybe he just didn’t have any money.

What then, eh.

Grandma at 100.

***

Never really been established. One day, visiting my dad’s house, he told me I had never really been ‘established’. It was a code word. I knew what he meant.

I was a grown man, mid-forties, and I had never really been established. Next time I stopped in, I had an envelope.

“What’s this,” he asked, probably wondering if I was going to ask him for money—

I sat down beside him and pulled out the mortgage papers. I showed him the property taxes, the gas bill, the power bill, the water bill, the insurance papers, all with my name on them.

My old man had a real bad habit, inherited from his own mother, of assuming I was still a child, and that I was never going to grow up.

“If that isn’t established, then I don’t know what is,” I told him. “Every one of these has my name on it. Like it or not, I have been established, sir.”

Years later, the old man had Parkinson’s, and I was there to look after him. Looking after an elderly parent, who was dying very, very slowly, gives one a certain perspective.

The other siblings had full-time jobs and busy lives. It’s not that they didn’t help out, but I was there every day.

I have no regrets about that, and it was probably the best thing I have ever done in my life. One night we had a little campfire out back, sat under the stars in our lawn chairs, sipping our beers, and we had the best conversation of our mutual lives. We understood each other, possibly even accepted each other—finally. Maybe we learned a little something about anger and forgiveness, life, death and the power of love. Maybe the old man accepted that he needed me for a change, rather than the other way around. We were friends at last. He had accepted me as an equal or something.

It was one of those precious things that can’t really be described.

At some point, somewhere along the way, I was all grown up, and there was no going back.

A little power, a little control, a little mastery over one’s own self, goes a long way.

If you can master yourself, you can master pretty much anything that life puts in your way.

And we have much to be grateful for.

 

END

 

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Google Play. A Stranger In Paris, an audiobook, is free for a limited time.

This story originally appeared somewhere else.

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