Emergency

The call yesterday came from a number I did not recognize, but I picked it up anyway since I had nothing better to do at the time but drive. It was my 91-year-old grandfather on the other end, apparently using the cell phone that, outside of the occasional storm surge that knocks out power and phone service as it had just done, stays bricked in a desk drawer somewhere inside the tri-level house he finished paying for in 1972.

“Jeffrey? It’s your Grandad. Do you all have power?”

We did, I told him. What did they need, I asked, fearing a tree was in their living room. Food or medication, I wondered. I hoped no one had fallen in the dark of the unpowered house, or, worse, that they were unable to eat at their regular 4:30 p.m. dinner time. I was even prepared to offer a place to sleep.

“Well, our freezers have been shut off for two hours, and our ice cream and frozens are going to melt.” To a humble, elderly white man living off a hefty Exxon pension that could buy him new ice creams and frozen foods almost ninety-thousand times over, this plight still amounts to a crisis.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” I told him. And so I diverted my track to the Vietnamese restaurant where our dinner order was waiting for pickup, pulled up to my grandfather’s tri-level and filled up two paper bags with their two-for-one Turkey Hill ice cream tubs and various brightly colored frozen food boxes. The bags were oversized ones from Olive Garden’s take-out service, because my grandfather is a simple man who doesn’t care what the local newspaper reviewer writes about the hip new restaurant with a single-noun name like “Salt” or “Ground” that was recently opened by a chef who has a sister restaurant in New York called “Pepper” or “air” (lowercase for effect), or perhaps trained under some bozo in Europe. He’d rather toss me the keys to his Lincoln Town Car and ask to drive us all to the Olive Garden, because it’s consistent and has comfortable seating and there are unlimited-based menu options. He also enjoys Red Lobster and has a hard time understanding how some minorities can afford to eat there, though we tend to always let this subtle commentary pass as a generational feature. He’s a sweet man.

Among the items I kept in the safety of our Kenmore’s freezer space - ample, I’ve since learned - were several empty green Country Crock margarine canisters filled with my Grandad’s homemade pork tenderloin and brown gravy, the latter a mixture of bacon grease, pork fat, butter, salt, cholesterol, oil and whatever remnants have piled up over decades of being fried up in a black iron skillet. It’s amazing but not for the faint of heart, literally and figuratively. And this morning, with several pounds of this substance accessible in my own home, I made four pieces of pork loin with a side of eggs. Neither the eggs or the pork was as good as he makes them, but I was more than pleased with the outcome. It was way better than Corn Flakes.

I checked in with him tonight. Figured that the power was back on, and therefore his flip phone was blacked out in a desk somewhere, and called the same number he’s had since the early 1950s.

“You all okay? Power up?” I asked.

“All good here,” he said.

I told him I’d bring his food back tomorrow evening sometime. “And I bet you can’t guess what I ate for breakfast,” I added.

“I hope it wasn’t any of my food.” And then, because he already knew, he laughed.