milk and grace

I've always been a person with absolutely no food rules. I prefer to eat certain things if I'm the one in control, but I really will eat almost anything. ANYTHING! I've had snails, I've had rattlesnake . . . I really will try anything at least once.
Growing up my sister had a list of about 5 things that she would eat and had some weird eccentricities about the way those things should be prepared. I was one of those skinny kids that could eat twice their weight and was always hungry, so I usually ended up eating my dinner and her rejected dinner.
The only thing I will refuse is milk. Cheese, yogurt, no problem - just don't give me a glass of milk. I've tried rice milk, soy milk, it's all the same. I don't even remember when it started.
My sister claims it was because of Grace.
My parents got married young and loved to go out when they got the chance. We were her only grandchildren in the U.S., so Grace was delighted to babysit us at a moment's notice. Therefore, we spent a lot of weekends there.
She was my mother's mom and a truly unconventional person. Grace painted, she sculpted, she sketched, she read voraciously. She wore men's clothes, no makeup and drove a Rambler that she never took out of second gear. A typical Saturday night would be spent watching Lawrence Welk while I set her hair (she liked to get gussied up for church, the only time I ever saw her in a dress until her funeral), my sister read a book in the corner and my Grandpa Sam worked on one of his crossword puzzles and tried to listen to the Cardinals game on KMOX while ignoring the Lennon Sisters.
She was the perfect babysitter. An unpretentious person who never talked down to children, Grace gave us huge sheets of butcher's paper to draw on, dug clay out of her back yard for us to sculpt and let us sleep on her screened-in back porch in the summertime.
The only drawback was that Grace was a truly terrible cook. She had suffered from neuralgia most of her life and really couldn't smell or taste much. She couldn't tell the temperature of things and frequently burned her tongue. My sister dreaded meals there. I don't remember refusing to eat any of her cooking, but there was something I didn't like about her milk. She insisted that we each have a glass of milk with breakfast. Grace's fridge didn't always work that well so the milk was usually either lukewarm or spoiled, something that I'm sure she didn't notice.
Getting me to drink my milk became the goal in her life. It was truly a battle of wills. Grace insisted that I couldn't get up from the table until I finished. I would sit and stare at the glass wishing I could vaporize it. She tried tinting the milk with food coloring hoping it would look more festive. Even though it was a lovely shade of lavender or mint green, to me it was still a glass of semi-spoiled milk. I even resorted to staying in bed pretending I was sick until my parents came to pick us up at noon - not something I could do every week, and boring besides.
Finally, it hit me. I could lie!
She would sit in silence with me, my sister's breakfast long finished. Eventually she would sigh, and leave the table for the restroom. All I had to do was run to the sink, dump the milk down the drain and time running the kitchen sink's tap to the toilet's flush. She would come back delighted to see my empty glass. I still feel slightly guilty about lying to her, but it made her so happy and was an act of self-preservation on my part. I hope she forgives me.
To this day, I still can't drink a glass of milk. I drink my coffee black. I eat cereal dry out of the box. Every once in a while I'll try a glass of milk to see if I still hate it.
All I can say is yes, I still do. Sorry, Grace.
If there's such a thing as reincarnation I know I'm gonna come back as a dairy cow.