“Ozzy why don’t you go to the shop and get some milk for the chai?”

“Ah yes”, he mutters.

my sweet grandfather picked up his tattered market bag and made his way toward the rickety bicycle that was his transportation around the sandy streets of Salem.

“Do you want to come baba”? He asks me.

A resounding yes, from my perch on the rock was heard as he sauntered toward the gate and out on the road.

Grampa had spent most of his recent days taking care of me, a mere nugget in the world. I sat on bicycle ledge in front of him and rang his bell ferociously.

”Baba, now why would you want to wake the nosy aunty across the way”? Leave her alone to sleep in peace. Let’s go to the shop and hurry back, its getting late and the dogs are going to chase us if we dont hurry. The stray dog epidemic is one that is a lost battle and quite frankly, the dogs have won. Wandering side streets and lonely roads are the surest way to come face to face with a rabid cur that will perhaps follow you all the way home while you run in terror or worse. Best to take a quiet and quick escape route that will do both.

I had come to realize that even though my times with Ozzie grampa were quiet and relaxing he had to discipline me when assigned a case. I happened to be sweet and relenting to reprimand, since I loved my grandfather and would much rather him dole out the punishments than my mother for example. I willingly accepted his teaching moments and made strides to learn from my mistakes. I hated letting him down.

At the end of these unusual ordeals, he usually awarded me with a mint candy, the ones that resemble moth balls wrapped in crinkly plastic. There seemed to be an unlimited supply of said candy who’s replenishment never came. How and where was this constant supply of sweet? I looked forward to the white spheres of poison as eagerly as a “good boy”, salivating for a crunchy piece of chicken wing that torpedoed onto the floor from a kitchen counter.

Now, I am way ahead of my time and surpassed years of disciplining from grampa Ozzie or anyone for that matter even though life still finds a way to teach me the lessons i never learn. I award myself a piece of candy, when i have endured a difficult life moment. Not everytime, Ayesha!- i shallow whisper into the freezer as I shove a box of popsicles into the abyss that is the north corner, in a feeble attempt to hide from my own sugar cravings.

In awaking into the reality that childhood traumas and maladaptive foundations are engraved into the scrolls of my childhood rearing, I see that much of my accomplishments or lack of, have been marred by these truths. I have lived and loved in ways that were delusional, to those people I associated or enabled. There was a healthy dollop of punish and reward in every life soup that I got myself into.

Should I keep up the reward of a sweet thing to remind me that it was all not that bad, and that my sugar cravings are more than just me wanting a little piece of desert after dinner? Or is there something far more foreboding in the need to suffocate in a vat of candy after the ‘whole ordeal’. Do we train ourselves like our mutts by awarding ourselves pieces of ‘sweet’ when life hits us in the malt balls?

I remember the time I attempted to make toffee, broke my tooth at a taste test, and rushed to the dentist. He said it wasn’t an emergency, but he also had perfect teeth.

How do we teach ourselves to regulate feelings of despair, or sadness without the chemical havoc that candy does to our brains and pancreas. Can we find a source of happiness that doesn’t also kill us? Why is it that we self soothe in ways that hurt us? Weren’t we just hurt by what happened? How is it ok to reward with a worse thing?

The sweet or candy that I am referring