Inevitable Vulnerability

The Ba-Ba Beenie Club was at our house today: Sam, Cole and Teddy. I made pizza for them, but Cole suggested "sugary cereal" instead, so they had Fruit Loops, with a chaser of fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies. I want them to like me.

Yesterday, I had a flashback of the time at the Blue Point Bar when Steve Simon said we should all tell of a time when we were the most vulnerable, an embarrassing moment in our lives. For me, these moments, these chocolate-sauce-dripping-down-a-new-white-shirt occurences are frequent, and I had one yesterday.

I'm very organized, but hugely impatient. Do it now, talk about it later. Go on, do it. Get it done.

Sam's teacher--the kind of person who deserves a "bless her heart" after her name--puts her "all" into Sam's class. She writes down everything the kids do each month, prints the reports out in color and does not leave one Painted Rock Day unturned. Sometimes I'm too busy for these lengthy accounts.

She sent a sheet home last Friday explaining that the kids would be making vegetable soup on Monday. Bring a vegetable. This is all I needed to know. I did notice an italicized "bring ONE," and I moved on to my next project after marking it in my brain index. One veggie. Monday. Next.

I thought it was a little weird, one veggie, and I even commented about it to Matt over the weekend. "Isn't that strange...one veggie? What if it's a mushroom? One mushroom? What about a green bean? One? How weird."

Never thought to re-read the teacher's three or four paragraphs because I already knew it all: Veggie soup. One veggie.

We bought fresh French-style green beans over the weekend, and I put two in a plastic bag. I took them into to Sam's class on Monday, telling the teacher and her assistant, "Well, they're French, so we brought two," as if we were being somewhat generous. The teachers looked at me incredulously.

I noticed that other moms were bringing in entire gardens of green beans, peppers, mushrooms. I drove my 8.5 miles home and re-read the memo. It read:

If the chosen veggie is a carrot, please bring ONE carrot, because I'll also be bringing carrots to class.

So, poor Sam represented two small French green beans in his class soup and, from what I hear, he ate most of it, too.

Matt almost choked he laughed so hard.