Mr. Monday and other tales of Jewish Amsterdam

MY YIDDISHE GRANDMA 71

But if the doctor prescribed something, she refused to take it. The bottle just stood on the corner of the mantelpiece and she did not take a drop.

With the nurse she bickered day and night, despite the high fever she was running. The nurse, that poor helpful creature in her blue-white uniform, really had more than she could do, running from one sickbed to the other.

The doctor prescribed some powders for Mother's flu. Grandmother was also to get some powders. Different ones, of course, for her pneumonia. The doctor warned the nurse against errors.

"Now, for G-d's sake, be careful, before you administer the medicine, be sure to read what it says on the label to see for whom it is. If the old woman gets the wrong powders, you can definitely write her off."

Nobody knows whether the nurse was confused by Grandmother's nagging or what, but she made a mistake. She mixed up the powders and did not discover it until it was too late. Pale as a corpse, the nurse went to Father and confessed her mistake.

Mother had got the powder intended for Grandma, but she recovered from her influenza all the same. She probably would have recovered anyhow without the medicine.

And Grandmother got the influenza powders. So three days later she sat up in bed and ate a piece of boiled halibut. Another week, and she was walking in the streets as usual.

She was not ill ever again until her end at the age of ninety-three.

Grandmother often talked about that powder incident afterwards.