06E064
My four-year-old daughter came into
the kitchen where my husband and I were cleaning up. "Can I have another
piece of candy?" she asked.
I turned to her and said indignantly,
"Of course not! Dinner's in half an hour!" But then my husband looked
at me with both pity and censure and said, "They've already eaten all theirs."
That would be my nine-year-old son and his best friend who had, unbeknownst to
me, eaten all their candy while playing cards in the other room. Turning to our
daughter, my husband gently said, "Yes, honey, you can have another piece,
but only one."
At first I was ready to march in
there and let the boys have it for eating all that sugar. Then, realizing I was
on tenuous moral ground, I shrugged and turned back to the dishes. What did I
expect after buying them candy and gum cigars, then setting them up with chips
and cards for a nice, cozy afternoon of poker?
I blame it on Mother Nature.
Fall in New England is the ne plus ultra when it
comes to old-fashioned Yankee fun. Look to your left and see 100-year-old
agricultural fairs. Look to your right and there are more apple picking
festivals than you can count. Look ahead and see fairs, parties and cookouts.
And everywhere, like weeds in a garden: pumpkins, scarecrows, gourds.
This year, much to the entire
region's dismay, it rained for most of the fall. And so, as we often do when
under duress, we resorted to the lowest common denominator; on this day, that
meant coffee, candy and poker. Have we become the people you fear your own kids
will befriend? I wondered about this when our son’s friend emotionally said,
"I only really live when I'm
with you." It could have been love, but then again, it could have been the
caffeine speaking.
Friends know that I lie to my own kids,
but I seem to have taken a turn for the worse by starting to urge other
people's children to lie as well. When this sweet boy happily exclaimed,
"I had coffee today for the first time!" I nervously replied,
"Let's keep that our little secret, okay, buddy?" Then I hastened to
add a jocular, "Just kidding!" But I wasn't. We adore this kid. When
we have him for the day, life is better. Never mind that his vegetarian parents
who both work for nonprofits don't even let him watch TV. We must have access
to him, even if it involves a little bait and switch.
Here were my thoughts: So he’d had
had a little coffee and a bit too much candy before dinner. So he'd learned how
to gamble at our house. That was hours before
drop-off. I came up with a plan to erase all unsavory memories from his mind:
the most wholesome vegetarian dinner in the world. Homemade vegetable soup with
homemade sourdough rolls. Chocolate milk from a local dairy. And hot-from-the-oven
fruit crisp, using apples we'd picked at a farm. Our strategy was, when we took
him home and told his parents about the day: focus on dinner.
A couple of months later, I was
starting to get nervous - we hadn't seen this friend since the Day of Coffee
and Gambling. Maybe my plan hadn't worked after all. But finally, I heard from
his dad - inviting my son and me to play pool with them. By the time the other
kids were expertly chalking up their cues and asking who wanted to break, I
knew we were home free.