“Did I put spice in here?” she whispered to herself in Spanish.

(Dedicated to James Wagner)

Both my grandmothers died a long time ago; they went mad in shoddy nursing homes after they had thrown away their glasses and lost their dentures. They basically starved themselves to death, stubbornly and silently and myopically. As did my mother and father, in their turn, twenty some odd years ago.
 They cooked and ate their food, even during their prime, in a heavy and cheerless manner; at times parsimoniously out of necessity, and at other times simply out of dullness or exhaustion.
And so I grew into a man who also plodded through most meals as a gluttonous chore. 
This morning, for instance, I was prepared to eat leftover vegetable soup from last Friday with a bit of leftover fruit cobbler that is mostly zucchini subsidized with too much brown sugar. While I read a book -- Fred Kaplan's 'Dickens: A Biography.' But I read an online story in the New York Times first, about an 'abuela,' a grandmother, who cooks for her grandsons who play on MLB teams. She cooks red beans in sofrito with shredded goat meat in adobe sauce, along with piles of saffron rice. Suddenly I wanted a grandma meal like that, not the congealed remains of last week. So I threw out my stale fruit cobbler and watery soup, and began a pot of black beans with tomatoes, full of tenderly fried bits of salt pork and chopped scallions and seasoned with cayenne pepper, brown sugar, and cumin. I put a cup of rice in the rice cooker, along with a diced red potato and a tablespoon of butter. Of course I'm making too much of it for just myself, so when I am finished eating -- which I will do out on my patio admiring the volunteer sunflowers the birds have planted for me among the rocks -- I will fill a plastic container to the brim with the leftovers and go door to door here in my senior citizens apartment building offering it to the first old lady who wants it. They are all old ladies on my floor -- there are no men at all. And I'll flirt with them, just a bit. 
This is no longer going to be a meal -- it's a celebration.