Chocolate Covered Cherries

DARK chocolate covered cherries that is.

After my first big brain surgery, back in the stone age when I was 23, my mother came up to Boston, from her tiny Western Pennsylvania town, to take care of me. Mother and Daddy were there on the day of Baby’s First Craniotomy too. 

Good thing too as my beau Stan had dumped me right after depositing me at the hospital the night before the big cutting do up. That’s another, already told, story though.

A few days or so past the operation, while still in my hospital bed on the neuro ward, my mother excitedly waltzed in carrying a large-ish, bright white, paper bag.

There I was, wondering what my life would be like now that deafness was an inevitability, now that my main goal in life was to make sure I had and kept a gig that provided health insurance that couldn’t turn me away for my mega pre-existing condition. (Obama-care being decades off and all)

Farewell to my big dream of living and painting in Berlin squats! Yeah, I was going all Schopenhauer on my poor bandaged brain and there’s my mother, grinning like the Cheshire Cat, practically tap dancing with glee over her find.

What was it?

Chocolate covered cherries. DARK chocolate covered cherries. She told me that I’d been just mad for them when I was small and, happily, the gift shop on the first floor carried them.

In bulk. Clearly.

Now, I didn’t and still don’t recall having a thing for these awesome babies BUT they are yummy and they totes cheered me. Mother and I sat there in that sad room, shared with four elderly-to-the-point-of-Baroque women, reading our novels, snarfing our goodies.

It was awesome.

Where’s this memory come from? Yesterday, while waiting in line for coffee at Peet’s in Coolidge Corner I spied a packet of deep red, candy coated, chocolate covered cherries.

Sinful!

I was struggling to break through a vile and miserably forlorn mood. What would mother do? She’d buy the damn sweeties and perk the fuck up!

So I did and I did.