When he heard my mother honking her horn, my grandfather would waddle outside to the driveway. My grandfather, David Russell Howard, did not voluntarily step on a scale, but any fair estimate of his weight would have to start at about 300 pounds. He was a big man and could no longer run, but he could waddle as well anybody I've ever seen. He would open the driver's side door and tug my mother out of the car and exclaim about her. She was even prettier than the last time he saw her, he would say. And then he would lead her up the cement steps into his narrow kitchen, where he was frying bacon for his beans.

My grandfather stocked food like he was afraid the world's supply might run out, and he made a point of showing off the beans and tomatoes he had canned recently. He pointed to the rows of glass jars while my mother feigned interest. Still, he hadn't spoken to me.

Somehow early in my childhood, probably not long after I learned to walk, my grandfather had taught me that during each visit I had to pass a certain test before he would speak to me. It had nothing to do with getting good report cards or growing taller, or giving presents to him or doing anything else my other grandfather asked about. No, my grandfather's test involved something he truly cared about: food.

So while he and my mother chatted, I was literally underfoot, anxiously digging through the sacks of flour in his pantry, emptying the pans from his cabinets, shuffling the milk cartons in his refrigerator. After some searching I found a box of individually wrapped curly Chee-Tos, the kind that came in a blue plastic bag, but I knew my work wasn't done. Somewhere else in his house -- maybe under a couch cushion or beneath a chair -- he had hidden a box of 10 individually wrapped Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

I was 5 years old -- no fast worker -- and by the time I scouted out the Reese's, my grandfather and my mother were drinking coffee in the living room, watching television and talking. My grandfather was full of stories about his garden and his experiences at the grocery store and his co-workers -- and he seemed to take pride in them -- but as soon as I announced I had found the Reese's and the Chee-Tos, he would cut himself off in mid-sentence, push himself up from his couch with a groan and leave my mother -- his only daughter -- alone on the couch.

His refrigerator was always full of 10-ounce glass bottles of Coca-Cola. Before he joined me outside, he popped the top from one of those bottles and carried it out to me. We sat down on the top step of his little cement porch, looking out at the rows of driveways and small, boxy houses.

With a quick, brusque tear he opened the Chee-Tos first. They were snacks. The Reese's were much more fragile, so he was childishly careful about peeling back the plastic shrink wrap.

"Dessert," he'd say and pass me peanut butter cup.

Sometimes he brought out his transistor radio, and we listened to Cincinnati Reds baseball games. Sometimes he would talk about his neighbors or ask about the work I was doing in kindergarten. Sometimes we said nothing at all.

I do not know how long we stayed out on his porch. To my mind it was forever. I felt guilty over abandoning my mother inside, but I also knew I was receiving something undeserved, something rare, an adult's undivided, unhurried attention for as long as I wanted it.

Were we there an hour? Or 10 minutes? Or less? I can't honestly say. But I do know that we sat there until my grandfather turned the bag of Chee-Tos upside down and let the last orange crumbs fall into his palm. He poured half the crumbs into his other hand and offered it to me. Sometimes I bent down and nibbled the crumbs from his palm like a hummingbird over a feeder.

And I also know we didn't go back inside until all 10 peanut butter cup wrappers were scattered on the porch around us. That was our agreement.

"Oh," my grandfather would say and clap himself on his stomach. "I ate too much." But he didn't mean it. Once we returned inside, he fixed plates of green beans and mashed potatoes for my mother and for me and for himself. Once, I ate so much that I waddled back to his garden and vomited.

"You all right?" he asked when I waddled back inside. I nodded. "Then take some more," he said. He handed me a fresh plate.

My grandfather was a fairly plain man. What he loved, he loved too much. His garden. His two children. His food. His oldest grandson. He had occupied himself with a long list of jobs -- as a monument carver and an insurance salesman and a security guard. Except when he was telling a story, he often looked sad, and a little distant from the world around him. Not surprisingly, given the way he ate, he had great big jowls that made him look a little like a basset hound. When my mother and my uncle spoke of him, they talked about his kindness and his simplicity.

All of that true, but my grandfather was also a magician. Somehow he had taken mass-produced products like Chee-Tos and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and transformed them into something that only we shared. They belonged to the two of us, and no advertising or labels could convince me otherwise.

After I turned 6 we moved to Hawaii, about as far away from Jeffersontown, Kentucky as I could imagine, and I only saw my grandfather on holidays. The first time back, I worried that he wouldn't remember, but we went through the same routine. He pretended not to notice me; I tore up his house looking for the snacks; we sat outside on the porch.

When I was 12, we moved back to Kentucky and things stayed pretty much the same, until he suffered a heart attack. He was 75 years old, had never been less than 50 pounds overweight and smoked too much, so no one was surprised. For a few weeks, he stayed alive in the Intensive Care Unit. My mother and I visited him, but he could barely remember who we were. A few days later he died.

My mother, my uncle and I cleaned out my grandfather's house. I didn't care about the bedroom or the living room, but I was very interested in the kitchen. We packed up his home-canned beans and the store-bought white hominy I would never eat and the bottles of Coca-Cola and packages of bacon. Even after the cabinets were empty, I kept digging through drawers, checking for the blue bag or the shrink-wrapped orange-colored Reese's wrappers. But I couldn't find them. I realized he didn't know I was coming.

Today, 15 years later, I still slow down in the potato chip aisle at the local grocery store, trying to find the blue bag of Chee-Tos (which doesn't look the same anymore). And in the candy aisle, I make sure they still carry the 10-packs of individually wrapped Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. I check to make sure they're there, and I look at them a while, and I don't buy them.

I've occasionally tasted one or the other of those snack foods, enough to be convinced they haven't altered their flavor in 15 years. And I am sure I would enjoy eating a bag just as much as I used to.

As I said, my grandfather was a magician. He transformed a product into something that had been created only for us to share, to the exclusion of my mother and the rest of the world. But what I didn't know -- what I couldn't have known at that age -- was that the magic didn't stop working when he died.

There the bags are on the shelf in front of me -- but I would never buy them. What I remember about them, what I would be looking for when I tore open the bag, is something no company would be capable of packaging.