71 cups and counting
When it comes to a drinking cup, Ash is obnoxiously particular. When asked to get her a glass of ice water, she doesn’t want the drink in an actual glass. She prefers that I grab the oversized, plastic, double walled Tervis with the fishes on it. Or the one with the anchor, and bruises from the dishwasher.
Not only do we have 71 cups in a household of two, and yes, I’ve counted, I also found three additional mugs in the storage unit the other week. Along with those, I found a marble Madeira cup that I brought home from Afghanistan in 2002. I’ve never drank from it for whatever reason, and don’t intend to in the future, but it should at least be with the others.
Anything from kid’s cups to handmade ceramic mugs, we’ve got every size of glass imaginable. Rocks glasses. Hi-balls. Glasses with dimples in them. Etched. Brazed. Stemmed. You name it, and we’ve probably got it. A case of authentic Guinness glasses fell off a truck when I was bartending and I’ve been lugging those around for decades, and those don’t even count towards the hoard.
I prefer drinking from a glass myself, whereas Ash prefers plastic. “There’s already plastic in the water,” I’ll joke to Ash.
She’s been sick for the past couple days. Not COVID sick, but rather a really gross, phlegm-filled cough that makes everything above the neck hurt. Never a fan of taking prescription medicines, she usually opts for alternatives that are not solely holistic, but are less harsh on her fragile innards.
For a tummy ache, she insists on taking Tums instead of Pepto Bismol. Instead of taking Tamiflu or something marked, “extra strength,” she’ll take Alka Seltzer instead. For a headache, she’ll suffer, unless it’s excruciating, to which she’ll probably also take Alka Seltzer. I’ll suggest taking a medication that will work towards combating the invading virus, and she’ll counterpoint that anything else is too harsh on her delicate system. After that, I can only commiserate with her.
A few nights after the first cough erupted, I was in the kitchen grabbing a drink of water before bedtime, and it sounded as if Ash were right behind me. She came out of the bedroom with a dejected face, slumped over like Droopy from Tom and Jerry.
“Hey, babe. How you feeling?,” I asked heartily.
She grumbled something under her breath and grabbed an old-fashioned, rocks glass from the open shelf. With eyes nearly closed, she initiated her bedtime medicine ritual, a practice she had been upholding for the past few nights.
After filling the glass halfway with water, she pulled out a package the size of two postage stamps, and began shaking it like someone trying to get the sugar to one side of the packet. It slapped the back of her hands with every thwap and I watched silently. After ripping the package in half, she dumped out two small, chalky circles into the cold water and waited.
The sodium bicarbonate mixture caused the drink to fizz as Ash waited for her concoction to calm down enough to drink. She couldn’t formulate words, sick from something, so we just watched the drink fizz quietly. I took a sip of my lukewarm fridge water and watched her stare at the fizzy fix-all, waiting for it to stop bubbling so she could suck it down.
“Is it just a cough, or something more you think?,” I asked, cautioning myself not to catch whatever it was.
“I’m not sure. I don’t like it whatever it is,” she replied.
“I know,” I sympathized. “Well, hopefully Alka Seltzer does the trick.”
It won’t. It never does. She could drink Alka Seltzer tabs for a year and all it would do is help with her indigestion, and mental well-being. She’s been taking it for three days, and it doesn’t seem to have helped one bit, then again, I used to think whiskey cured a hangover.
Once the medicinal mixture stopped bubbling, she took a deep breath, squinted her eyes and slugged the drink back like a cowboy at a saloon. She only got half of it down. The rest was still fizzing in the bar glass, clutched in her grip. She gasped like a child after taking too large of a sip as she examined the other half of the drink.
“Blech!,” she blurted out.
Determined, she gulped down the remaining sip of her nonalcoholic digestif, visibly dismayed, and placed the glass on the counter.
“Uggghhh. It’s so bad,” she wretched.
Usually she’ll swallow it in one big gulp so that she doesn’t have to endure the task twice. Like ripping a bandaid from a wound in an armpit. Or trying to dig a bullet out of your arm. It’s not something you want to fuddle around with, and it never gets easier.
I mentioned our hoard of drinkware earlier, bringing up the fact that Ash typically prefers her drinks in a Tervis. It’s only when she’s sick that she’ll grab a rocks glass to toss back a hard one, and wince. Since she hasn’t touched alcohol in like a decade, it’s fun to pretend that she’s throwing back Sambuca like a sorority sister in heat anytime she takes medicine.
I love that about her. Now if I could get her to throw away some of these damn cups.