My Grandmother And Me, Part II

3) An hour after taking Grandmother to her hairdresser's, she calls.  She said it would take all afternoon.  Sheesh.

I pass by the kitchen on the way down the stairs to the front door.  She has the rice cooker on; it has the keep warm light on.  There are also plastic cups of leftovers laying out on the counter.  She has these ready to be cooked once she gets home.

Coming home, she bullshits about things I don't understand and don't care about even if I did understand.  If I recall correctly, she was looking at and asking about restaurants and fast food shops along the way.

And then, as she has done many times before, she tells me, "Take me to the grocery store.  I want to get something to eat."

"But you have leftovers you took out of the fridge at home!" I say.

"There's nothing to eat at home," she replied.

But you just took out ... oh, never mind, she's in her eighties.

4) One day last week I came home from "work" and smelled this, um, unique fragrance.  Didn't think anything of it till I got to the kitchen.

There I saw Grandmother had a pot boiling on the stove.  But the smoke coming up from under the lid was profuse, and the smell that I smelled when I came in did not smell like any food I know.  So I open the lid.  It was all black and burned underneath.  Then I looked inside the pot.  There was nothing in the pot.  Grandmother put a completely empty pot on a hot stove.

I think she was done cooking something but, as she has done once in a while, forgot to turn off the coil.  She then moved the empty pot onto the coil thinking it was cold because she wanted to move some stuff around.  Either that or she planned to cook something, put the pot on the stove, turned it on, went back into her room to watch her videos and completely forgot about it, which she has oftentimes done, and also forgot that she didn't put anything in it.

Anyway, I told her about the stove and what happened to the pot.  It's a pot we use frequently, and it may have been so badly burned that it was unusable.  Grandmother tried to cool it and scrape away the burns, but I doubt she did.

I'm glad I came home when I did.  If I came back any later, who knows what would've happened?