At the Cheesecake Factory...

The Saturday I arrived to babysit my three granddaughters, the middle one, Lillian, was already sick with a stomach flu. This made things doubly difficult because I had to take Lillian with us when I delivered Molly, the oldest, to her sixth grade graduation party that evening at the most rural farmhouse I had ever been to in North Carolina. That was at 5:30.

At 9, in the dark, I had to return, with Olivia and poor Lillian in tow, to retrieve Molly. In the midst of Lillian’s moans of agony I tried desperately to retrace my earlier course since this place was off the GPS grid. Successful at last, we returned home and Lilly was asleep when her head hit her pillow. The next day she began to recover.

I had to take the girls to school on Monday but I gave Lilly an extra day to make a complete recovery. Tuesday everyone went to school and one of the girl's teachers mentioned that everyone seemed to have what Lilly had. That afternoon their mother, thankfully, arrived back from Dallas with news of their new house in Texas.

Rather than cook again, and not wanting to rush Jessica back into her mother’s routine, I suggested we go out for supper. It was field day at Lilly and Olivia’s school so those two had had a busy and energetic day. The girls wanted to go to The Cheesecake Factory.

On the way there, Olivia complained that her stomach hurt. Perhaps she was dehydrated from a busy field day in the sun. I gave her some water. We were seated in a semi-circular booth and delightedly ordered our food. Lilly sat across from me at one end with her mother next, then Olivia, me and finally Molly.

The food arrived and Olivia, now looking quite green and acting more subdued than usual, leaned over and said something to her mother who immediately reached into that enormous pocketbook she carries and pulled out a plastic shopping bag. Olivia put her head in it and you know the rest of that story!

Lilly noticed and began saying, “Oh, Oh, Oh” louder than I wished she would. This caused Molly to notice and she has a notoriously weak constitution for this sort of thing. She began a sort of low moan.

Finally, exhausted and relieved, Olivia sat back and began to eye her corn dogs with a renewed enthusiasm. I was completely done in. After four days of worry that I was doing the right thing and having the responsibility for these lovely youngsters, all I wanted to do was go home and collapse into bed.

I looked at Jessica and said I was going to the men's room. Without so much as missing a beat she pushed a plastic bag toward me and said, “Here, take this with you.”

I don’t know if you have had the thrill of taking a "bag o throw-up" across the dining room of a fancy restaurant. I had never had such an opportunity and I wasn’t at all sure how it was supposed to be done.

When my brothers and I were the girls ages and we would leave for school in the morning, our Spartan mother would often declare, “With your shield or on it!” as we went through the door. And so, I decided, I would rise up proudly from our booth, walk proudly across the restaurant, carry my precious puke, a proud man, a Spartan man and his plastic bag. And so I did. And I never even looked back.