The Isolation Journals - Day 49

We're sticking with the topic of home today, and today's entry is sweet.  Just not in the way you'd expect.  Maybe a little too sweet.  So I just want to preface by saying my oral health is excellent. 

I actually went to the dentist yesterday, which was strange on multiple levels.  Weird to interact with another human, let alone be touched by them, weird that all the topics of small talk with the hygienist were off the table.  Did I have a good weekend?  How the hell should I know?  What is weekend?  Any plans for the summer?  Well, sure but I guarantee you don't want to hear about my plans to maintain a mundane daily routine and perform the mental gymnastics necessary to convince myself there's a point to life.  Just scrape that plaque and get on with it.

Prompt:  Think about a memory attached to a specific room in your childhood home. Write about the feelings and/or lessons you extracted from it that anchor you even in the present day.

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There's a room in my grandmother's rambling 1800s farmhouse that we call The Pool Room.  The walls are paneled in wood planks that were salvaged from an old barn when the house was relocated and renovated in the early 1960s.  There's an out-of-tune piano in one corner, two faux-leather recliners, a set of the 1966 edition of the Encyclopedia Americana on the mustard-colored built-in bookshelves.  A couch, a TV.  And, naturally, a pool table.  

The pool table's massive bulk dominates the room, which truly isn't quite large enough for the billiards table to be functional as such.  One must get creative to finish a game of 8-ball without causing property damage with the back end of a cue.  Given that, the pool table has served many alternative purposes over the years - building LEGO cities, doing puzzles, wrapping gifts, and hiding evidence.

Like any self-respecting grandmother, mine kept a candy dish fully stocked at all times.  But Iowa did not play.  This was not your bush league hard candy that every woman of a certain age is required to keep moldering in the bottom of her purse.  None of that Werther's Original nonsense.  This was the good stuff.  Hershey's Kisses.  Reese's Cups.  Sometimes even fun-size Fifth Avenue bars.

The pewter candy bowl lived on the dining room hutch cabinet.  One had to pass through the dining room , and thus, the candy, to get to the pool room.  It was unavoidable.  It was irresistible.

I spent a massive amount of my childhood on the couch in the pool room, watching Saved by the Bell, all the TGIF shows, and also a bunch of shows a kid had no business watching, like Oprah and Seinfeld.  The amount of candy I put away during that time is, in retrospect, truly horrifying.  My teeth hurt just thinking about it.  Even at the time, I knew I was doing something wrong.  Not from a perspective of body shame or nutrition.  I just knew I was being greedy, I was being sneaky, and I was 100% ruining my appetite for dinner.  I could not get caught.  

So I did what any kid would do.  I hid the evidence, and I hid it poorly.  If I would have tried to dispose of my trash like a normal human, I would have risked exposure on my journey through the dining room and into the kitchen with an alarming fistful of candy wrappers.  So I'd ball them up individually and stuff them into the pockets of the pool table, where they would, I dunno, disappear?  I did this for years, imagining the table's insides mimicking my own, full to bursting with the detritus of my candy binges.

The ruse was successful.  I thought I was pulling it off, until the fateful day when one of my younger cousins crawled under the pool table, which, it turns out, was mostly hollow.  He surfaced, fists full of ancient artifacts like some kind of triumphant archaeologist.  The jig was up.

Was there a lesson to be learned from this naked exposure of my dietary indiscretions?  Sure, there were plenty.  Don't be greedy, don't be a sneak, don't be a glutton, find better hiding spots, your cousin is a narc, etc.  Did I learn any of the right ones?  Probably not, but I did start putting my candy wrappers in the trash.