The Lunch Thief Who Was Also “Religious”
Mamacita says: I was reading a friend’s post about her lunch being constantly stolen at work, and it reminded me of the co-worker who was obsessed with food. He “sampled” other people’s lunches almost daily, sometimes just taking a few bites and sometimes taking the whole sandwich He would help himself to a few chips from one lunch, a few Fritos from another lunch, a tomato slice, a few pickles. . . you get the picture.
If there was cake or pie or anything sweet, he took the whole thing; he had a massive sweet tooth. (This is not the principal who roamed the cafeteria stealing bits and pieces of students’ lunches; this was a teacher who stole other teachers’ lunches.)
Sometimes we would take our lunches from the lounge refrigerator and a sandwich would be warm – he had microwaved it before taking half of it. If there was a pitch-in, he NEVER contributed anything but would always casually walk through and fill a plate, commenting that it looked like we had plenty of food.
The year before I started there, the teachers gave him the ‘ex-lax brownie treatment,’ which knocked him out of work for several days but didn’t teach him anything. Whenever food was mentioned, his eyes would glisten and his breathing changed. He was obsessed with food. He was a fat guy who passed most of his workload onto his aide, and whenever his name came up in conversation, all kinds of food-stealing-related stories came up in quick succession. My own lunches were usually pretty boring unless I brought leftovers, so leftovers days were the only times he messed with mine, but what I really remember is the day I brought a cheesecake to a pitch-in and when I opened the fridge to take it out and put the topping on it, a huge slice had been stolen.
Whenever I see this guy on Facebook, all I can think of is how those eyes would glisten at the mere mention of food, and how he was supposedly so religious yet would feel justified in stealing other people’s lunches almost daily. A fine deacon and occasional preacher. Right. No respect.
Werewolves, Vampires, and Orange Politicians
Mamacita says: I think life would be a lot more interesting if werewolves and vampires were real.
People who learned how to deal with them would be fine, and people who refused to learn and doubted their existence would be dead. Analogy? Make of it what you will.
My Beautiful Mother
Mamacita says: A year ago yesterday, I found my mother lying on her bathroom floor, fully conscious, but unable to get up. The evidence told me that she had fallen in her bedroom, pulling down some furniture trying to break her fall, and crawled down her hallway to the bathroom. She had lain there for most of the night.
If I had not gone over there to take her to an early lab appointment, she would have lain there several hours longer.
The ambulance took almost forty minutes to get here, and at the local hospital she seemed groggy and embarrassed but okay-ish, all things considered. Then she told me that her chest felt heavy. I knew from experience what that meant.
She was rushed by ambulance again to a nearby city hospital as the local one doesn’t do cardiac. The family started gathering and there was an aura of unreality about the whole thing. My son lives near that hospital and he spent a lot of time with her, talking about his childhood memories with her and ordering Cokes (with ice, very important) for her and helping her hold and drink them.
A year ago today, her minister visited her and they talked for about fifteen minutes. My sister and her family ran down to the cafeteria for a quick bite and I went back to her room. She looked at me, gasped a few times, and was gone. My mother, who took care of me until it was my turn to take care of her, was gone.
A full year later, I am still filling dinner plates, marking pedicure dates, thinking about giving her a call to see if she wants to go out for pizza with us, saving the breast and wing for her when we have chicken, and putting pickled beets and sweet onions in my cart, in my head. Her mail, and she still gets tons of mail, is still being forwarded, but that won’t be for much longer.
I will always miss my beautiful, wonderful mother, the best mother ever created. I am sitting in her brown leather chair and thinking about her, a year after she died. I can close my eyes and see her in this chair, “clicker ” in hand, watching “Murder She Wrote” and asking Alexa about the weather. I know it will get better as more time passes, but right now things are still pretty raw.
