The Grape Juice Incident

Long before the lemon juice incident or the orange juice incident came the grape juice incident. The grape juice incident happened in the early months of 1970, now fifty years ago. But it is indelibly etched in my memory.

Me and my three siblings, about 18 months before the grape juice incident.

Some time in early 1970, probably around March, when I was in the ninth grade, I got the mumps. The illness struck out of the blue, because no one I knew had the mumps. I had a light case, and I wasn’t in much discomfort. In fact, I was bored staying at home. I think I had to stay away from school for at least a week. It was during that time that my mother told me to read Pride and Prejudice, and my love of Jane Austen and many other 19th-century English writers began.

A couple of weeks after I recuperated, my brother came down with the mumps. As frequently happened when I brought diseases into the house, he had a worse case than I did—I think the germs circulating at home were more numerous or more intense than the ones I encountered wherever I was exposed.

One afternoon while he was still suffering, Mother had to go out somewhere and left me in charge of my three younger siblings—the sick brother (who was in the seventh grade that year), our preschool sister, and our toddler brother. Mother instructed me to give them all a snack when the younger ones got up from their naps.

So in mid-afternoon, I dutifully got them all into the kitchen and fed them juice and some food—cookies or crackers, I can’t remember, but that part of the snack isn’t important to the story. What is important is that Mother had told me to give apple juice to the younger two and grape juice to my mumpy brother. There wasn’t enough apple juice for everyone.

“Grape juice hurts,” the sick brother complained. His glands were still swollen, and he didn’t want the acid in the grape juice. Apple juice was sweeter.

“I want grape juice,” my sister declared.

“Mother said you get apple,” I told her.

She threw a fuss, as she sometimes did. Then toddler brother got into the act. “Gwape joose.”

At this point, I made an executive decision intended to stop the three of them from whining. The little kids would have grape juice, and the sick brother would get apple. I poured the drinks accordingly.

And the inevitable happened. Toddler brother spilled his grape juice.

It was an epic spill. These were the days before sippy cups. The whole four ounces or so of grape juice flowed over him, his high chair, and the floor. It splashed on the kitchen table and on the walls. Dark, purple, Welch’s Concord Grape Juice. The kind that stains almost indelibly.

I yelled at littlest brother, and then I started cleaning up.

Then Mother came home. She yelled at me. Apparently, at age fourteen I was not supposed to be making executive decisions. She told me in very firm tones—and told me repeatedly and angrily—that I should not have countermanded her order to give the younger children apple juice, even to do the nice thing for my sick brother.

And I also should have done a better job of cleaning up the mess. She continued to yell at me as we both scrubbed floor and walls and everything else in the kitchen that was purple.

I think we were still finding sticky splotches of Welch’s for days afterward.

When have you made a well-intentioned decision that proved to be a mistake?