My weekend’s version of Brazilian black bean feijoada lacked the usual jerked Pantanal beef and Minas choriço, but it had the bacon and the bay, the onions and the garlic cloves, and smelled mildly divine. The feijoada would top seasoned rice and pair well with buttered collard greens, both waiting in pans on the stove. But my sweetheart’s sudden kidney stone had other dinner plans in mind. Mom offered to put the food away while I watched over my moaning girlfriend in the basement. Her going home was out of the question, and she was not quite ready to jump off the precipice of a trip to the emergency room. Her in-between space would be one of the five beds that lined the wall of basement great room. I checked in with Mom at 9:53 pm, the precise time of her movement toward the stair lift with her taupe cup filled with ice cubes. She had plopped the bean stew, crock pot bag and all, into one plastic container, cramming the rice into another. “Thanks Mom,” I said, grateful she had offered to help. “See you tomorrow.” I lay in the bed next to my sweetheart’s. I watched her breathing. I listened to her moans float up from her sleep, aided by a leftover Percocet. For Mom, “tomorrow” meant the biannual church conference at 10 am, which she could watch on her 20-year-old TV if I connected my laptop by HTML and ran Zoom. But didn’t sleep until 5, slipping at 7 into my sweetheart’s bed, careful not to wake her. Connected to a wall a charger, my phone began to ring. I didn’t care who it was, and let it ring as I tried to doze. But after the fifth call, as the hour approached 10, I knew it must be Mom, and I saw her transcribed voice message: “Roger, come upstairs and pick up the thing for me,” by which I presumed she meant, “Roger, come upstairs and hook up your laptop to the TV for me.” I marched up the stairs and as she was dialing my number for the sixth time and told her to stop calling me. During the church broadcast, I set to cleaning the previous night’s cooking mess. I sprayed a few stray grains of rice into the drain, and switched on the disposal. As the water whirred, the adjacent sink began filling up with creamy white water, and grains of rice—lots of rice. I tried plunging the sink, but the action only forced water through the disposal’s gasket and down the hole in the cabinet floor—I haven’t gone to the basement yet to look at the ceiling, and I don’t want to. I sighed with the profound truth that I would have to disassemble the piping below the sink. I found the gooseneck—and the extension, and the pipe leading to the sewer—densely impacted with rice. What my finger couldn’t scoop out, I pried out with a fork. Cup after cup of rice grains…and older, smellier detritus…filled my dirty water bowl. That’s when I realized that what rice hadn’t fit in the plastic container had gone down the sink drain. “Well Mom, I guess we know now that we can’t wash rice down the drain,” I commented as I showed her the contents of the bowl, feeling quite smug with my generous use of the pronoun “we.” She texted me later: “Roger. I am so sorry that I made such a mess for you to fix. I thought the rice had all gone down the drain. From now on I will put leftovers in the garbage can.” Or, I responded, using a second container for the leftovers would be an acceptable alternative to tossing them. Oh…the stone passed without jumping into the hospital void. Thank God.

(Photo from Reddit, used under the Fair Use Doctrine.)