Burned Toast (Fiction)

Smell is the most evocative of senses and the smell of burned toast was the only smell that could send Jana into a tail-spin. 

Long after the fact, everybody agreed that burnt toast was the first sign that her grandfather had embarked on a long, slow, inexorable downward slide.

Her grandfather, Vernon Judson, could have been a Senator or Judge or a millionaire if he had wanted to. People came to him from all over the county to get the benefit of his wisdom.

He would stand behind the counter of the old, small-town hardware store and dispense nails, screws, plumbing supplies and advice.

When a well-meaning customer suggested he run for office Jana's Pop-pop would clear his throat and intone “You can’t walk through a barn-yard without getting slop on your boots. And I ain’t about to track the kind of slop politicians wade through into Miss Millie’s house.”

Everybody had a very clear picture of what Vernon meant by “barnyard slop”.

According to Jana’s older aunts and uncles, that was Pop-pop in a nutshell, able to boil any situation into a pithy comment. Not just pithy, but brimming with wisdom and clearly pointing the way to the proper resolution.

Jana had not known him at the peak of his once towering intellect. Far from it. Her father had moved the family back to his home-town to assist in caring for the aging Vernon. Much of that burden fell to Jana, or at least it had seemed that way from the perspective of a 7th grade girl who was trying to make a place for herself in a new school.

For Jana, those years had been so horrible and so traumatic that she had blacked them out of her mind. She had entered seventh grade at the small, rural school as an athletic girl with boobs that were a full six months (eons in the minds of 7th graders) ahead of her peers. She had set the local male contingent on fire because...wait for it...she was from CALIFORNIA. This was at a time when songs by the Beach-Boys dominated the Top-40.

Her teacher parked her in the epicenter of the "mean-girls" (pinched nose Lisa and horse-face Diane) who wasted no time in "putting her in her place". They instinctively smelled out her vulnerability to relentless ridicule of old Vernon. Nearly every day was filled with snide, back-stabbing gossip of old Vernon walking about town with with his fly gaping open or his leaving the old Ford running while he ambled into the diner.

The vicious girls took unholy joy in demolishing Jana on a daily basis. Frequent repetition made the ridicule and humiliation something of an institution, a monument to petty vindictiveness. Lisa and Diane learned to  love the rush of inflicting pain. The stories morphed from unzipped flies to pants first wetted and then a few years later, soiled in public.

Jana retreated into her books, her studies and deep, deep sadness. She approached every school-day with stomach-churning dread. But she soldiered on, just like her father who worked a factory job in a town 55 miles away. Just like her mother negotiating the tightly-knit, insular society of the small town. Day-after-day. Week-after-week. Year-after-year.

Vernon’s decline took years. He passed away during her sophomore year of college.

Jana did not attend the funeral. She had no desire to ever set foot in that small town again.

The Vernon she had first known had told stories that were entertaining for their zany tangents. And yes, he burned the toast. Then he regressed to repeating stories that he was sure he had never shared and Miss Millie removed the toaster from the kitchen. Then it was the same story every day.

Jana learned much later that dementia patients are like drunks. Some are happy. Most are sad. Some are angry and violent.

Vernon slid through all three of those types. In the end he was consumed by paranoia and was sure that people were moving his precious things around to confuse him. He was sure that they had stolen his Seiko watch and his ruby class ring, items that Jana’s father had locked in the safe so Vernon would not lose or destroy them.

Vernon raged that combination of the safe had been changed. That was the last big blow-out before Jana went off to college. Pop-pop Vernon ineffectually swatting at her father with his cane and cursing him...Pop-pop Vernon, former elder of his church cursing like a sailor. Her father ducked the feeble blows and did his best to appear contrite and fearful...and failed.

Afterward, Jana asked her dad “Why did you change the combination? You had to know it would make him mad!”

Her father sadly shook his head. “The combination is the same that it has always been. It is Pop-pop’s birthday 11-23-17.”

Throughout the years leading to her final memories of her Pop-pop, she heard that it all started with Pop-pop burning his morning toast. He had pushed down the plunger and then got distracted. Turning around, he saw the bread was not pushed down and he would pushed it down again...and again...and again...until Miss Millie, who was drinking tea in the sun-room smelled the smoke and went to investigate.

Burnt toast was the first solid clue anybody had that Vernon was losing his mind.

The second time it happened, Miss Millie, her grandmother, took Pop-pop to the family doctor. Dementia was diagnosed. The prognosis was grim. “Progressive”. “Untreatable”. “Get help.” “Make memories”.

Jana was not around when her father passed away. Jana had her career, a very demanding and all-consuming career. She also had a pathological aversion to sick people. Sadly, her father also experienced dementia late in his battle with peripheral artery disease. In rare moments of introspection, Jana realized that she had chosen her career to armor herself against the kinds of commitments that her father had foisted upon her.

She had been unable to stay for the visitation. She attended, but suddenly became sick to her stomach when one of the care-givers started to tell a story about how her father would burn food...including toast. “And how can anybody burn toast???”

So the burned toast that was patiently waiting in the toaster was rife with violent currents beneath the surface; dark, roiling currents and jagged rocks.

Every excruciating psychic puncture-wound from Junior High and High School flooded her consciousness. Every heartbreaking step-down in Pop-pops mental capability and the concurrent decay of his body. It was overwhelming.

Looking back, Jana realized that Gowain, her husband, had been more absent-minded lately. She had told him things that minutes later he would have no recollection of.

Gowain had always lived in his head. That is a hazard for anybody who enjoys reading Shakespeare’s plays and paints water colors. But Jana had always loved him passionately. Gowain was movie-star handsome but completely oblivious to the fact. He spoke in calm and measured tones that only enhanced the weight of the thought that he put into what he was going to say, thought he invested before even opening up his mouth.

Jana was deeply conflicted. She just COULDN’T spend the final decade of her life watching another man she loved disintegrate before her eyes. She just COULDN'T!

She had found love late-in-life and thrown herself into it 100%. She was SO vulnerable. She knew she was too weak to live through the pain one more time.

And yet it was Gowain. Gowain who had healed her when she was most battered and bruised. Gowain who had always given her kind words and rescued her from recurring funks. Gowain who was the center of her life, her metronome, her heartbeat.

Jana remembered a prayer. “God, give me the strength to get through today. And if that is not possible, then give me the strength to get through the next hour. Failing that, give me the strength I need to live through this moment.” 

The tension tore every fiber of her being. Pain that she had thought safely buried in the past ripped through her.

“Gowain! You burned your toast!” Jana called down the hallway to the bedroom where Gowain was dressing in his putter-about-the-yard clothes.

“I don’t think so, dear. Is it white-bread or whole-wheat?” Gowain asked.

Jana looked. “Its white-bread. Why would you ask such a stupid question. We never buy whole-wheat bread.”

Jana’s tone seem shrill and strained, even to herself.

“No, dear. I started buying whole-wheat this last month because Doctor Kermudge said I need the fiber. If the burned toast is white-bread, it is undoubtedly yours” Gowain said with infinite kindness.

Jana looked at the loaf of bread next to the toaster. It was clearly white bread. Jana stared at the toast as if it were a venomous snake coiled around her ankle. It WAS white-bread...and now she remembered undoing the twist-tie on the wrapper and dropping two slices of bread into the toaster.

Gowain padded into the kitchen. "Is there a problem?" he asked in his kind and gentle way...