People with obsessions (both major and minor) are fantastic inspiration for developing unique characters in a story. Take my real life Grandma Nellie, for instance. She was obsessed with containers and their sizes. She was a tiny person (like I am) and did not like anything BIG. This included her food portions and the containers she stored them in. Let’s say she had some tuna salad left over and had it in a Tupperware container. If she ate some of those leftovers – but not all – she would look for a new, smaller Tupperware container. She did not care about all the extra work washing the extra containers. The thought of leftover containers containing empty space kept her up at night. Literally.

Granny would go to the grocery store and ask for 3 slices of turkey at the deli counter. (They could never see her over the counter, but she was loud and they cold certainly hear her!) When she came home she would wrap each piece in waxed paper and freeze them. Yuck! Once when my brother was in town, he went to the grocery store for her. While reading her list he thought he’d be “nice” and buy her 1 pound of turkey slices and not just 3 slices. Nice? She yelled at me about that for more than 6 months. “I’m one person and I cannot eat all that food! What is wrong with your brother? Tell me! What was he thinking!” (It’s been 12 years, but I still have to get him back for putting me through that.)

While she was in Hospice care and on her deathbed, she grabbed my arm and said, “I knew it. God is punishing me. I am going to die with all that #%*&*#@*!@ butter in my freezer!”

I promised her I would use her butter when she died, and I assured her it would not go to waste. “You’ll never use all that #%*&*#@*!@ butter,” she told me. “You are just telling me that so I will calm down. No one can use that much butter!” When I cleaned out her freezer after her she passed away, thinking I’d find 25 pounds of butter, there was a measly 2 and half sticks in there! They were individually rewrapped in waxed paper. I had a good laugh.

Megalophobia is fear of large spaces. But I have yet to find a word for fear of too much food.

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