So pretty much every week, we ferry our elderly neighbour about to do some shopping and so on. She will take me and the little children out to lunch after. They adore her and call her Oma, which is German for "grandmother." She grew up in Nazi Germany and can tell stories. Already, Woodjie has learnt that playing with guns is not a fun thing. Playing with guns and explosions and bombs and things means that children do not eat. Oma stuffs the children with sweets and chocolate muffins when we go out to eat, perhaps because she did not get enough when she was a little girl.
One thing Oma does is to swipe handfuls of lollies every time she goes to the bank. She keeps them in ziploc bags and hands them to me every now and then. I think growing up very desperate must have an effect on the mind as one ages. I remember my own grandmother, who lived through the Depression, swiping sugar packets from every restaurant she would visit. Then she would get them all out on her visits and tell us stories about each sugar packet. (Really. Actually some of the stories she would tell would be pretty interesting and she did have a knack for collecting some pretty weird-looking sugar packets. Looking back, I wonder where she ate because today all I can ever find is the boring Sweet-n-Low stuff in restaurants.)
The littlest children love the "mystery" flavour of lollypops the very best. Which is odd because I could just NOT LOOK and grab a lolly from the container but that is not good enough. It has to have the "mystery" wrapper. In real life, I've read that "mystery" is just the lolly bits from switching from one flavour to another so it's a combination of some kind. But the children still have much discussion about what good "mystery" flavours would be. A list:
Garlic
Cheese n' Jelly
Sugar Cookie
Water
Pineapple Pepperoni
Somehow I'm not very hungry if that's the case. Although I might be persuaded to try the "sugar cookie" flavour.
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Look Out, Dad!!
My father is the purple dot above the blue weather station. He's juuust outside Milton's evacuation zone. Well! My brother and I jus...
Not a lolly person but the other half is, always a pile of lollies on his coffee table in front of the TV, he likes to munch and watch.
ReplyDeleteI am very fond of chocolate,
Merle...............
My mum had some odd habits from the post war years too. She was born in 1926 and grew up not wasting anything. Uneaten sandwiches were saved for later, leftovers were kept and used as a "stew" on another day. and so on. I remember one time in the 70s, when my kids were quite young and I only had three of them then, we ate sandwiches in a cafe and the kids didn't finish theirs, mum took the meat from the uneaten sandwiches, wrapped it up and put it in her handbag to take home. "It's paid for, don't waste it" she'd say. And always the same with cakes if we had a snack at a cafe. I was always embarrassed and so were the kids. We understood why, but still wished she wouldn't.
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