Ammi Midstokke: Stoicism as inoculation against malady

My adopted grandmother, Marge, is 94, still stokes her own wood fire, seems to live primarily on ice cream and beer, and appears immune to all disease. When I visit, she makes me feel important and needed by requesting that I complete random chores for her: taking a box of books to the library, finding a particular beer from a particular local brewery, checking the post office box.

I cook her meals from scratch and then portion them into toddler-sized helpings, writing the date and dish on the plastic bags before placing them in the freezer. The sedentary life of a woman tethered to an oxygen machine does not require many calories. The daily beer, poured into an iced glass as a ritual of class, seems to provide the bulk of them.

On the table next to her chair is a book for identifying birds (though she knows them all) and a new iPhone. She has long mastered the game of solitaire on her iPad, but not yet learned how to filter her junk mail. The tiny dog on her lap is so ancient, she appears stiff and weathered like a taxidermied animal come back to life. The dog totters back and forth when she walks, ghost eyes, but ever aware of the potential for treats.

Sometime around 5 the neighbor, Neva, appears. She is of the age and etiquette that cannot arrive empty-handed, so if I say to bring nothing, she arrives with a freshly baked tray of brownies, a box of unheard of books from 1904, a bowl of vegetable chips we must try because they are “baked not fried.” These women are of the generation forever scarred by the campaign against cholesterol, but Marge has blatantly rebelled against this after surviving 30 years of my granny’s Egg-Beaters and cardboard bran muffins before she died.

I am wary of food prepared by this peer group. They always sneak something weird in there, like using a dented discount can of Hungry Man in their spaghetti sauce.

There was something about the brownies I did not trust, and thankfully avoided them with my reliable suspect-food-mitigation strategy: I have celiac’s and cannot eat wheat. This reality has saved me from so many bad potato salads and canned-soup casseroles, it’s almost worth the lack of croissants in my life.

My teenager ate the brownies and had discovered the vintage chocolate stash in the pantry. I don’t know what it is about old people, but they seem to hoard chocolates and Hallmark cards for every occasion. You could burst into any elderly person’s office space with a need for the most obscure holiday card and they’d be like, “Oh, I have the most beautiful gold-leafed sympathy card for National Lost Sock day.” Then, they’d hand you some leftover Lindor truffles from a Christmas party they attended before retiring in 1982.

I grew up on the vintage chocolate and antique jelly beans in that pantry and ate myself sick every summer when I visited. I would sneak out of my room, turn the light on in the tiny kitchen closet, and close the door behind me so I could pilfer for treasures Nabisco had long discontinued.

Granny, in her intuitive wisdom that such a thing might happen, inevitably stockpiled dry-goods antiquities, along with guess-the-contents jars of pickled food by neighbors long dead.

As a matter of family tradition, I reminded my child to eat something of substance from time to time, and also to honor the strategic method of taking chocolates from different jars so no one really notices just how much is missing.

The only thing that has changed from when I was a child is that I harness my god-given right as an adult to eat candy in the middle of the kitchen right before dinner. Spoiling my appetite is a matter of status.

The next day, we were not but a few miles into our return journey home when the kid paled and complained of nausea. The righteousness of motherhood came over me in some internal dialogue about letting life teach its natural consequences.

“Maybe you ate a little too much chocolate,” I ventured. “And those brownies.”

The kid is smart and met my wisdom with the succinct dismissiveness one gets accustomed to when raising teenagers.

“I eat like that all the time and don’t get sick.”

As the hours of our drive wore on, his pallor went from a kind of grey to a kind of green. It was not until I was careening through a rainstorm in the dark on I-90 at wherever mile marker is the farthest from an exit that he began vomiting. I’d handed him a bag emptied of its dog kibble, which no doubt helped inspire the convulsions. The subsequent hours of our drive were spent desperately searching for a place to pull over so my kid could cough in the rain and try to expunge himself of all evidence of dessert debauchery.

Even while watching the poor dear sleep on the bathroom floor, I was feeling pretty chuffed about my restraint in Granny’s pantry. It wasn’t until the next morning when my sacred cup of coffee tasted suspiciously bitter that I surmised the true culprit.

The karmic justice arrived within hours and the carnage ensued. There is nothing quite so humbling as a stomach flu.

While my husband followed us around the house with sterile wipes, I worried we’d infected the sweet old ladies back in Marge’s neighborhood, but she appears impervious to all manner of microbes or calamity, except maybe the Packers losing a game.

If I could just muster a dollop of her stoicism, I might make it to my 90s on beer and ice cream, too.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com