Frank and I had started the evening with an after-work jog. Dinner consisted of Subway sandwiches and we had ended up for dessert at the mall coffee shop where they have the best Smoothies in town. We placed our strawberry-banana Smoothie order and stepped aside to wait along the coffee shop counter. We began to amble around and sniff under the glass lids of the canisters of coffee beans. “I like the smell of the Chocolate Fudge and Southern Pecan,” I allowed.
I was surprised when he said, “I like the Vanilla Cream and Amaretto.” He had never shown any interest in coffee of any flavor in all of our 16 years of marriage. Many times we’ve been offered coffee by friends and I’ve piped up to politely explain that ‘he never drinks coffee, he just doesn’t like the taste’ or ‘you know he doesn’t sleep too well now, why if he drank a cup of coffee he’d be awake for days!’.
With this hint of interest in coffee flavors I pressed ahead in an effort to get my foot in the coffee drinking door. “Perhaps if you tried a good cup of coffee,” I said, “You might like it. I don’t ever want to drink coffee regularly every morning myself, but I do enjoy an occasional cup of special coffee. Some coffees I have tasted have a fine full flavor.”
” No,” he replied, “Grown-ups drink coffee. I never want to be a grown-up.”
Now, I wasn’t surprised about his refusal to drink the stuff and I was happy to continue to visit our coffee shop for Smoothies, but I was taken aback by his reasoning. All those years I had stepped right in to speak for him with reasonable explanations for his behavior and I had been way off the mark.
My consternation at that moment must have rivaled my mother’s own astonishment the day she found out my reason for sobbing and throwing up every morning before going to my first grade class. I had made my entire family miserable that whole school year. For years after my mother retold the story of my first grade nausea. “And,” she would say, “It was all because Dugie was scared of her teacher Mrs. Maxwell.”
Now, Mrs. Maxwell was over 6 feet tall and sported a husky linebacker voice, but in my adult life I realized that I couldn’t continue to let her take the blame. One day when I was about thirty and I was as usual standing silently by as my mother retold my first grade gastric failure I felt compelled to finally set the record straight. “Mom,” I said, “Actually, I think I was upset about the grilled cheese sandwich.”
My mother looked shocked and puzzled all at once. “What are you talking about?” She demanded.
“Well, you see,” I explained, “I was thinking about all that crying and throwing up and I think it was because I missed being at home all day. Before I went to first grade I could spend the day doing whatever I wanted and I could eat a grilled cheese sandwich with daddy when he came home for lunch.”
My mother still has sympathetic nausea every morning from that traumatic year, but she doesn’t tell the story very much since that grilled cheese thing is too hard to explain. I’m thinkin‘ I should be more cautious about speakin‘ for Frank in the future, too. Who would’ve ever thought he didn’t want to grow-up.
