Quintessentially Quilly

A Hero Tumbles From His Pedestal

My dinner for the church ladies was a qualified success — I wasn’t as happy with it as everyone else seemed to be.  No one left hungry though, so it wasn’t a failure.  There were a couple of moments from the evening I truly enjoyed.  The dinner was for a parenting class, so there were children present.  One five year-old wanted to go through the food line “by myself, mommy.”

Mommy said okay, but told him he had to have some salad and some vegetable.  The boy took two little lettuce pieces and dumped a tablespoon of salad dressing on them.  He deftly flitted past the veggie bowl.  When he got to the end of the counter he found me.   I looked at his plate.  “Didn’t your mom say you had to have vegetable?” I asked.  The young man narrowed his eyes and stuck out his bottom lip, but he went back and got one very tiny piece of broccoli.  I winked at him.

Later the same young man arrived at the dessert station with his older brother.  The brother, a 6th grader, asked me for help cutting the pumpkin pie.  I sliced it and put a piece on a plate for him.  The younger boy stood holding his own plate.  It had a brownie on it.  He looked at the pie as his brother squirted whipped cream on it and exclaimed,  “You aren’t going to eat that are you?”

The older brother said, “Sure I am.  It’s just whipped cream.”

“No –“  The little one exclaimed, “– the pie!  It’s pumpkin.”

“I know.” The older boy answered.  “Pumpkin pie is my favorite.”

“But pumpkin is a vegetable!”  The little one exclaimed in horror as he stared at his obviously deranged former hero.

~*~

Something to Be Thankful For

Thursday I volunteered in a third grade classroom at the elementary school.  One of the kids I worked with, Oliver, is a Drew Carrey look-alike.  Blond hair, flat-top, blue eyes and black-framed square-ish glasses.  We were reading about the pilgrims.  The article finished with the words, “And we still eat those same foods when we celebrate Thanksgiving today.”  After Oliver finished reading the sentence I exclaimed, “Is that really true, do we really eat those same foods today?”

“We do at my house,” Oliver said very decisively.  “Really?”  I questioned.  “The exact same food?  And it isn’t moldy or anything?”

Of course all the kids in my reading group eew-ed.  Hannah explained that same can mean “just like” rather than “exactly alike”.

Oliver said, “That was really gross, Ms. A.  I am a boy and I think that was really gross.”

Hannah said, “Like turkey.  I bet we will all have turkey for Thanksgiving, so that is the same, but we will all have different turkeys.  Get it?”

Then Oliver said, “Besides, those pilgrims probably ate everything because they were really hungry!”  Then he added, “And if there were any left-overs they were probably gone at least 100 years ago!”