Category Archives: The Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse

The Big Vitamin

I don’t have a problem taking pills. Oh, occasionally, I’ll pop a capsule in my mouth and go to get a drink and get sidelined and have an issue with the outside of the capsule dissolving in my mouth and the powder inside tasting really bad. (Please don’t let this happen to you with green tea supplements; it took me forever to get the overwhelming taste off my tongue.) For the most part, though, pill taking is not something I think about.

Vitamin C tablets got me doing so, however. These tablets are 500 mg and are about as big as a dime in circumference and – measuring from bulge to bulge on each side – close to a third of an inch thick. It was a big bottle and a big letter C on the bottle but I had no idea they were huge.

I know it now. When I first looked at one, I felt a bit of apprehension but tossed it in my mouth and started drinking water. That tablet was basically riding the waves of the incoming attempted swallows. Oh, the water went down but the tablet would bounce back and eventually I was sloshing water out of my mouth and wondering if I was going to choke. Obviously, it worked out. But it was not a one time deal; it has become a challenge. Fortunately for me, I have learned a method, but I am not so certain of this method and don’t attempt a Vitamin C encounter in front of anyone.

This was the second time I have been confronted with a big, dry pill. The first time was when I was five and had the chickenpox. I definitely remember being bundled up on the sofa with a little bed tray over my lap that held some breakfast and the morning pill that was a cube like one of a pair of dice. This memory does not deal with my first time taking the medicine; I think I blocked that out of my mind. This was the time I decided to hide it under the saucer on my tray. My mother eventually picked up the tray and, yes, not too long later she returned to grin and ask, “Did you hide that pill?” There’s not too much a five year old can do when the jig is  up – I confessed. And I don’t remember what happened then. Maybe, just maybe, she cut it up.

Another thing I remember from my kindergarten year was coming home in the afternoon and deciding I would try out the idea of entertaining myself. For a few hours, I played “store” and kept to myself. I heard my mother say to my father when he came home that I had played all afternoon without bothering her. And, although I can’t remember the sophistication of my vocabulary at the time, I very definitely remember the essence of my thought: “Well, don’t count on it happening again, lady, because it was incredibly boring.”

Mother was undoubtedly happy when first grade came and I went to all day school.

We need entertainment

Having watched our way through tons of movies and documentaries during the virus slowdown, we need new entertainment here at the PBC&R; we are thinking minions. Minions who tell jokes, do dance lines, sing, get everyone laughing in a crazy giggling chorus would add much festivity to the atmosphere.

I don’t know – maybe the Minions could re-enact movies, such as Casablanca. Or, possibly not. If no Minions are available, I may have to bring in a group of Tickle Me Elmos. They are so cute when the fall down laughing and bang the floor with their arms.

Jeez, it’s going to be a long four years.

Recurring thoughts

I have no real idea why I started to think of of the late basketball coach Jimmy Valvano, but I did; for that matter I have been doing so for the last few days. I remember walking out of the kitchen decades ago and meeting my father coming the other way; he was laughing and relating how a winning coach had run around looking for someone to celebrate with and had wound up beening kissed by the Athletic Director.  I think I though, “Okaaaaay.”

I didn’t think of it as a touchstone back then, but I realize now that most weekends there would be a sports event on the TV. I’m from Indiana  –  Hoosiers Indiana – and I went to basketball games at little unconsolidated schools before I have any memory of going. In fact, one of my bedtime stories from before the time I was five was about the night my cousin, who was considerably older, broke his arm playing during a high school game. I remember the story; I don’t remember it happening. My mother once remarked that my dad had gone with his nephew and brother-in-law to the hospital and she and I had come on home with my grandparents.

Basketball was such a part of small town Indiana life that decades later my father would remember some occasion he and and his family attended by starting his  sentence with: “I had an 8th grade basketball game that night . . .”

I have let nostalgia get in the way of my little story here. The coach who got kissed was Jimmy Valvano and he would later die of an aggressive cancer. Shortly before his death, he was asked to receive The Arthur Ashe Courage & Humanitarian Award. I doubt the awarding committee realized how incapacitated he was, but, after some consideration, he traveled to accept it . . . and make a speech. And what a speech it was. It’s on YouTube and maybe once a year I listen to it. If you want, you can take the 11 minutes to watch it, and if you do, I think you’ll be glad you did.