My grandmother lived in an upstairs attic apartment, right across from an old flour mill that clanked continuously day and night. That made conversation hard, because she was old and growing deaf and I was young and too impatient to ever say anything twice. And she never put any candy in her candy dish.
But I liked going up the dim, steep stairs to her small room filled with chipped knick-knacks, because her hugability was enormous; with her humped back she was shaped somewhat like a crescent roll, so I could snuggle right into her, fitting in like a jigsaw puzzle piece.
She kept lavender sachets everywhere. One winter day I found a soggy sachet in the bowl of tomato soup she made me. The soup didn’t taste too bad; I knew better than to ask for another bowl. She would have given it to me, but then would go without her own bowl of soup sometime that week. Her apartment smelled like my Aunt Julia’s bathroom, which was crammed with French milled soap.
I asked her one day why she never put any candy in her candy dish.
She gave me a gentle, crooked smile. Her dentures were mail order and didn’t fit very well; when she did smile they tended to slip around in her mouth. They fell out at my brother Bill’s wedding, right into the punch bowl, and sank like a stone. Bill fished them out with a set of ice tongs.
She told me the candy dish was a very valuable piece of rich cut glass that she had gotten as a wedding present from her husband’s people up in Montreal. They had not come to the wedding, she continued, but they did send the candy dish. She used to keep bon bons in it. I stopped her there, demanding to know what bon bons were. She looked out the window facing the clattering flour mill while she told me that once long ago people would work all day to hand-roll little balls of chocolate with delicious fillings inside, and that these were very expensive, but back then she kept her candy bowl full of them. Then her glasses stopped working and she took them off and didn’t talk anymore.
But I knew what had happened; mom had told me. Grandpa had run off with a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl to Toronto and never came back. I suddenly hated him very much, because he was keeping me from having any of those wonderful-sounding bon bons. My grandmother saw the fierce resentment in my face; she went to her kitchen cabinet and brought back a box of graham crackers. We ate them in companionable but sad silence together, washed down with tap water, and I forgave Grandpa for taking the bon bons away from me for his Ziegfeld girl – whatever the heck THAT was.
Tim lives in Provo, Utah. He is the proud father of eight children. A former circus clown, he currently works in social media and edits the political humor blog http://iwritetheblogggs.com/ He can be contacted attorkythai911@gmail.com
