This column was originally published in Writer’s Block in the October 18, 2017 edition of The Chronotype, Rice Lake, Wisconsin.
What follows is not my story, but one of many favorites from the best storyteller I’ve ever known. It is 2 years this Friday since my father passed away peacefully on a beautiful autumn evening. He was 66 years old. I thought it appropriate to honor his passing with a story—one that combines some of the things he loved best—food, mystery and life lessons.
One night, in the early hours of a desert dawn, deep in the Golden State, a man stood in a darkened kitchen, contemplating his midnight snack options. Opting for a childhood favorite and attempting to maintain stealth, he moved in the darkness quietly and with familiarity. He reached into the bread drawer, pulled out some wheat bread, grabbed the jar of chunky peanut butter from the cupboard and a rich raspberry jam (always with seeds) from the fridge.
It was a simple task that did not require lights to perform. An intravenous surgeon by day, assembling the classic American sandwich was a small effort, even in the pitch dark. He meticulously spread the peanut butter evenly over one slice of bread and the jam on the other, careful to get the ratios just right as he had done countless times before.
He then slowly and deliberately consumed his creation, likely without beverage as he once told me that drinking interferes with the tasting process. Given that it was a PB&J though, I think he likely had some water or milk to wash it down. Or he soon wished he did.
Licking the last bits of jelly from his finger, my father contemplated a second sandwich. He would later recount to us that his assessment of the first sandwich was that it was the. very. best. peanut butter and jelly sandwich he had ever had. Ever.
For whatever reason, to begin assembling the second sandwich, he decided to illuminate the process, which would be the beginning of the end for this midnight culinary journey.
In the glaring light of the kitchen fluorescent, he reached into the bread drawer to obtain two more slices for a second, delectable treat. As he peered through the bread bag though, it was clear that something was amiss. Drawing the first slice of bread out, his fingers brushed against a thick layer of green/black mold. Not a spot, not an edge, but the entire slice, front and back was covered in the fuzzy fungi. As was every single slice to follow.
Now, here is where my father took a moment to consider his options. He had just consumed the best-tasting peanut butter and jelly sandwich ever assembled in the history of time. He had all the pieces to duplicate it, including the same bread from the same bread bag. Do you do it again, now knowing what you didn’t know before?
He said he struggled with this for an inappropriate amount of time and finally concluded that he just could not bring himself to do it again.
At 40-something years old, my father had discovered once again that profound lesson that ignorance truly is bliss, but the alternative was something he lived voraciously—knowledge was power and control and excellence and learning meant being a better person today than you were yesterday.
My dad embraced the dark realities of adult life and extracted all the lessons he could, applied them to himself and tried to give them to us, and still found his youth in a sandwich.
Our naive hearts and minds sometimes were ready for these lessons, but often, as I am learning with my own children, life lessons require a unique experience to really be able to absorb the truth.
Sometimes we have to unknowingly eat our own moldy sandwiches to truly understand some of life’s most profound teachings.
Gently Rise, Softly Call 