Amygdalae

“We’re going South Beach again,” my dad will say every six months or so. The architect of the best selling diet forgot human nature in his schematic, or at least the tendency of my father to hate the thought of lettuce, chicken, or fish for supper and flavored ricotta cheese for dessert. Phase Four of the South Beach cycle, we call it. He slowly allows white flour, sugar, red meat, and potatoes back into his life after the first three starchless, fatless phases and half of the thirty-some pounds lost stop by to let him know just how much they missed him.

We know it’s begun again in earnest when a plastic bag of almonds appears on the kitchen counter. The cashews he used to eat—too much oil and salt—repulsed us, but

a chocolate cake has a longer life expectancy in the Ackerman household than a pound and a half of plain almonds. You sweep them up with your fingers and they rest perfectly in your palm, squeaking against each other and falling between your fingers if you squeeze. The tissue-thin wrapping looks like fir tree bark and tastes a little bitter, like tea, but yields to white pulp and a sweetness that resonates in your nose. Nothing is more honest than a raw, unsalted almond, and as with all honest things, with only a small amount you become full.

Too much of anything can kill you. This is wisdom as old as healing, one of the snakes circling Mercury’s staff in the Caduceus and the unwritten epitaph, the unlearned lesson of my two dead grandfathers.

When we go back to sagebrush, rattlesnakes, and cows of my father’s hometown, he will stop, just for a moment, at the graveyard his own father maintained. The trees they planted, father and son, are the only tall and green things for hours, and the world’s most honest retirement plan. My father and I feel with our wits and cry only when we are afraid. He cannot talk about my grandfather’s stroke and the three days spent catatonic on a flowered bedspread, breathing in his life but not living it, without leaving the room.

There are almonds in our brains, cradled by twin seahorses—the amygdalae and the hippocampi, both named for their shapes. The honesty of these two almonds does not come from the flavor of a white pulp, but from the neurons and synapses firing to hold memories, memories of what makes us cry, love, and tremble. From the almonds inside, we know fear, we know love, and we learn.

My mother’s father had a heart almost as big as his stomach. The only living grandfather of mine to spin such tales with a twinkle in his eye, he told me it was because he swallowed a watermelon seed and it took root and flourished. We could believe anything he said, anything, if it wasn’t about the war or his body. Nothing could kill him if he’d survived the war, if he’d stopped smoking. No one died from ice cream, not with a red-blooded son-in-law and white-haired granddaughter. Ambulance by ambulance, his arteries became blocked by the lies.

As his brothers fattened from the beef and lay delirious on beds of yellowing rural hospital beds from cigarette strokes, my father tried and failed to quit tobacco and regularly conducted junk-food raids of his now diabetic father-in-law’s study. I went with on the flights to Boise, listened to the angry rants as the Cheetos found the trashcan week after week, and banished the red from my plate while my parents scoffed. Around the time dad began to get tingling in his arms, waves of blackness in his eyes after exertion, and letters from the doctor concerned about his triglycerides, grandpa had a failing liver and nothing left near his heart to bypass to. We visited him in the hospital, and while my mom snuck him chocolate malts, my dad and I wore silent circles around the courtyards, two almonds crying and learning.

Another serpent completes the healer’s symbol, answering its paradoxical partner: What we call poisons, in minute doses, are sometimes our only cures. Cyanide—more specifically, hydrogen-cyanide, the kind used to kill individuals in laced drinks or races in showers-- comes from the kitchen almond’s wild twin.

The almonds first appeared in their plastic bags shortly after we buried my last grandfather under flowering cherry trees. Tear-shaped, they were our way of showing fear, fear of the excess fat, the clogged arteries, the lung cancer, the nicotine strokes. Then the lab reports came back boasting dwindling triglycerides, a healthy heart, and a whole life to spend out of hospitals. Now that somewhere in our minds we have learned from the sadness, the almonds our escape. We fight over the last, honest handful.