The Final Chocolate

For that summer job in 1961, I waited on tables, sleeping on an iron cot with other young women in a dim, basement room of a grand, Maine coastal hotel built in 1903. The spacious dining room had white wainscoting below orange, large-flowered wallpaper with big windows overlooking the golf course behind it.

One night, in the kitchen, I was sliding two lobster dinners off a high, metal shelf when my tray slipped. The young man who owned the hotel glanced at me, his mouth set, but said nothing as I washed the lobsters, rearranged the lemon wedges and went to serve. My nightly vending machine chocolate bar got me through.

In May of 1997, I drove from mid-central Florida through small Georgia towns of magnolias and hanging Spanish moss, onto highways until reaching a friend’s home in New Jersey. The following day, crossing the George Washington Bridge through New York City, by now I felt exhausted and ate the first of three chocolate bars. After further miles I ate the second then the third, until safely reaching my Connecticut daughter’s home.

My cardiologist told me, at sixty-seven, to now eat only one small piece of chocolate a day for my heart. But three years later, when my neurologist said he knew of a shop with vegetarian chocolate that he thought would be good for me, I bought a number of bars. Soon I had escalated to three squares a day and, facing that, gave the rest away—having had my final piece of chocolate.

My realization is, "Choices of what is good for us, or not good, can be hard, but when readiness is there, we may find that we are able to make the better decision."