Cheese & Whine

During a recent family get together up north, my brother jokingly admitted (over a few beers) we should write a script to capture the crazy, funny and sometimes sad times of our child hood.

Although that thought has always been in the back of my mind, I never knew what to write about or where to start. But, like anything else, I guess the best place to start is in the beginning.

One of my earliest memories has me kneeling on a sofa and peering out the window looking onto the porch and towards the old arcade and corner store directly across the street. I remembered it getting dark and being alone for a long time. I remembered taking hot, sweaty naps on a thick, green shag carpet.

I drank juice from a glass bottle that was on the lower level in the refrigerator and fed myself with pieces of cheese I was able to break free from a huge block.

For the longest time after that I thought maybe they’re not my memories. I figured it was possibly a scene from a movie I watched as a kid and it got stuck in my head.

No such luck. Twenty-five or so years later, I moved back home to rebuild my life after a failed marriage or 2. I sat around the table with my grandmother, feeling sorry for myself and trying to make sense of why I was there. I’ll save her response to that for another time.

She started to tell me the story of how she came looking for me when I was a kid. At that time, I lived a block away from my grandparents on the same street. My grandmother had not seen me in a few days and wanted to check on her only grandchild.

She walked down the street and onto the porch of my white and green house and found her 4 year old grandson staring back at her through the front window.

She let herself inside with a spare key and looked around for my mom, who was nowhere to be found.

She noticed I wasn’t able to get off the couch and I had a high fever. She surveyed the tiny house and noted an empty Riunite wine bottle in the fridge and a pack of old cheese that I was apparently gorging on.

I was scooped up in my Underroos and driven immediately to the hospital emergency room to get checked out. Once we were able to be seen, the doctor looked at me and asked my grandmother if I was retarded. She informed him she thought I may be drunk, which I was.

It’s funny how times have changed. If I took a drunk 4 year old to the emergency room today, I would be arrested and charged with everything from tax evasion to putting out a bad health care plan.

However, some things haven’t changed too much. Apparently that night I was taken back home and allowed to sleep off the wine. I’ve been reliving that same scenario as an adult. Substitute the wine for whatever’s on tap.

I was told my mom moved to California during that time and left me behind to be the man of the house, alone. And to think, all that time I thought she was at work.

This isn’t a sad childhood story. There were a lot of valuable lessons learned during that three day period.

I was able to provide for myself. I learned sleeping on shag carpets is not something I’d recommend and lastly, whenever times get tough alcohol is always my friend.