Everyone needs a Gramma: sorry mine is taken

In a small ranch style home on a small, out of the way street in the almost imperceptibly small town of Jackson, there lives a small Croatian woman with a very, very big range of talents. She is a mistress of the garden, home and hearth, she cooks, she sews, she reads, she writes, she is an active financial advisor with portfolios that would make Wall Street financial gurus come looking for advice if only they knew. But her greatest talent lies in what we in her inner circle have decided to call, wielding the persuasio-ray gun (she is also a dab hand with the briliant-suggestobot-5000, the embarrassing-anecdotator and of course, the guiltron-beam-generator).
Her name is Amelia. Many call her Mellie. I am fortunate, OK blessed to call her Gramma. I actually moved to my current home to be nearer to my family, and by family of course I meant Gramma. Manteca, where I had been living was to say the least, the pits. There was a train that ran through town east to west and one north to south and there might have even been one north by north west for all the stupid things barreled through any and every neighborhood at all hours of the day and night.
It was boring. There was a bar called The Rusty Hook which was as appealing as its name suggests. There was a defunct water slide park, a set of broken monkey bars (fun for the whole family) and of course, a fast food restaurant not merely on every corner but occasionally crowding multiple burger/ taco joints on any one corner.
That was the recreational offering for the area, the next major city being about an hour's drive, the next nature park/ open space/ unpaved surface about 2 hours to the east. So the moment the window opened I squeezed through and moved myself and beagle up to beautiful Amador county, jewel of the California Motherlode.
The air here smells like hot oak and fresh grass. Traffic jams happen only when old Mrs. Onetto drops a jar of home made persimmon jam in the cross walk. There isn't any fast food where I live in Sutter Creek, unless you count the ice cream shop where the food is ready fast but you'll build up an appetite waiting for the line around the block to subside. There are no trains. The whole place is a nature park.
From my doorstep I can hear the cheers from the high school football games on Fridays, and the music from the ragtime festival, or the blues festival or the cutesy-little-old-west-themed-festival that's taking place on any given Saturday.
The place is, in total contrast to Manteca, utterly wholesome.
And in this wholesome environment with its high school football games and its cutesy festivals and its persimmon flavored traffic jams, right in the middle of that lives Gramma.
Gramma, an immigrant from 1920's Craotia, grew up mainly in the town of Jackson. There she learned her mother's favorite Austrian dishes like strudel, traditional Croatian fair, policinkas, and cevapcici, and a hodgepodge of local cuisine brought from all over the world by the miner's families who peopled the place.
Having grown up surrounded by people from every country and continent, Gramma can knock out a gulash to please Atilla the Hun himself; she can whip up a chicken curry in no time flat. She can do a Cornish pasty, Italian gnocci and ravioli, borscht, pot roast, barbecue, you name it.
And so, as I sat at her kitchen table chin in hands, bemoaning the fact that I had nooooo time to cook, that I was Forced to resort to Fast food and prepackaged frozen food (which of course I did not like, not at all, no really, I'd so rather eat healthy) Gramma buzzed around the kitchen stirring pots and turning meats and adding spices and flavors and chopping and crushing and....
"Why don't you pick out a few things you'd like to eat and we'll learn how to make them," she suggested as I launched into another diatribe on my lousy cooking skills.
Ah, the brilliant-suggestobot 5000. I might have expected it. And it was air tight and perfectly aimed as usual. I was going to spend at least a couple of hours a week at Gramma's place, I might as well spend them learning to cook. And no, it was no trouble. She'd be cooking anyway and would be glad for the company. No, we wouldn't do anything complicated until I got better at it. No there didn't have to be any brussels sprouts and you could use cauliflower almost anywhere it called for broccoli.
As usual with the suggestobot (and it was even worse when the guiltron beams were released and I was reminded how much she missed me and thought I should have more incentive to visit) was bullet proof. All my excuses about time and energy went right out the window, and half the ingredients would come from her garden, so no, there'd be no real expense.
I was trapped, like being trapped against your will in a dentist's office: it would be good for me I knew. It would even probably be fun, all that hanging around with Gramma. But as that fresh from the dentist feeling eliminates any excuse you may have for not smiling, so cooking with Gramma would mean one less thing in my I-can't-lose-weight-because litany of lies I told myself.

As usual, despite my misgivings the persuedo ray gun won out in the end. Gramma and I spent a day or two a week cooking stuffed cabbage with dill, Cajun Jambolaya, something French that required several extra arms to prepare (that had been my suggestion from my one and only cooking book), turkey soup, spicy chili, and anything else we could make 7 servings of for me to eat during the week. And because we had no more than 7 servings I knew exactly how much I could eat per day and not have to cook again the rest of the week.
And before I knew it I no longer worried about depleting my I-can't-lose-weight-because litany; I no longer needed it. Cooking with Gramma, combined with a quick if uninteresting walk every morning, ensured that in just 2 weeks I lost six pounds. And I hadn't even meant to.
And then instead of doing the thing one in my condition would reasonably expect of pounds that come off, they stayed away. In fact within a month even more of them had gone. And they kept going.
And all because someone who cared for me had taken the time to show me what she knew: not merely how to cook, but how to join her in caring for me.

I have a friend who always texts me at our mutual lunch hour. "What's for lunch?" I ask.
"Tuna on wheat, lettuce, pickle. You?"
"Calamari fajitas with black beans, red and green bell peppers, onion, zuchini and yellow squash sprinkled with gorgonzola cheese on white corn tortillas."
"Show off."
I'd invite him to my extraordinary feasts but he seems to have his mind made up to eat healthy.