My grandfather liked to eat orange peels. They had medicinal value for him. He had to eat certain kinds of food at set times of day. No matter where he was, he would have to stop what he was doing and find the right food, or else his chemical balance would be disrupted, and insulin shock would hit him.
He could eat orange peels anytime. First, he’d peel an orange, and he would feed me some of the inner sections. This while he was in his easy chair. He had nothing against the juicy parts; he took a couple of them. But it was the peels he was after.
I saw the shards as cast-offs, items for the trash. They would lie on a plate, like parts of a puzzle that would never be put together. I wouldn’t touch the scraps, but my grandfather would pick them up and chew them without a wince or complaint. He swallowed the peels with pleasure.
I wondered what kind of animals ate orange peels. I didn’t see farm animals eating citrus of any kind. I didn’t see any farmers bringing orange peels to the cow stalls or the pigpens. Ants, though, could handle orange peels; they could carry many times their weight. They would gang up and bring the peels back to their nest.
One day, I picked up a peel and chewed on it. Immediately, my face contorted. I couldn’t get the rind down. I had to cough it up.
“Don’t worry about it,” my grandfather said as he reached over and mussed my hair, “you’ve got plenty of time.”
Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of six books; Border Crossings is his latest. Haywire won the Members’ Choice award, given by the Asian American Writers Workshop. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, Medgar Evers College, and the Writer’s Voice of the West Side YMCA in New York. He received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.