The first time that happened. Donna ate frantically, to get the food
out of the way so that she could see the ant. After that, I expected
the game to pall, but it never has. Since the first week or two Grant
hasn't often put an ant under her plate, but she invariably cleans her
plate, wipes off any remaining food particles with a piece of bread,
and peers carefully through the glass. After all, she is obviously
thinking, there might really be an ant this time! She has never tried,
since the first day we played the game, to lift the plate and look
under it. The first day, though, she was prepared to whisk the plate
out of the way so that she could see what was going on under it. I
brushed the forever-straggling brown hair out of her eyes and told her
she must eat the food all gone--then she could see the ant.
She made one last, hopeful attempt to remove the plate. "Nope," I said
sternly, "that wouldn't be cricket."
She shook her head vigorously. "Not cwicket," she corrected me. "Ant!"
David, about this time, developed the habit of coming home with the
pockets of his overalls stuffed full of dry bread. I grew tired of
finding bread crumbs all over the house, but nothing I could say would
prevent him from coming home the next day with his pockets full again.
He was extremely reticent about the matter, but we finally discovered
that the teachers in the cafeteria watched the children to be sure that
they ate their lunch, and that David, not inclined to eat his bread,
jammed it into his pockets so that the teachers would think he had
eaten it.
After weeks of trying unsuccessfully to prevent David from bringing
home pocketsful of bread crumbs, I sighed and gave up. I decided to be
philosophical about it--to be glad it was the bread, and not the main
course, he got rid of in that fashion. Some things, after all, could be
worse than a pocketful of bread--a pocketful of spaghetti with tomato
sauce, for instance!
Our first Hallowe'en in Banning was spent in fear and trembling.
Pranksters could do us so much damage! We had tormented visions of
fourteen cabins with windows smeared and streaked with soap. Each cabin
has at least four windows, and we weren't at all eager to clean soap
off that many windows.
Anything that children or ruffians might do would be inevitably worse
than anything that could have been done to us in Los Angeles. We had,
as a matter of fact, the normal citizen's amount of risk--multiplied by
fourteen!
We were lucky, though. Aside from a few "trick-or-treaters," on whom we
lavished candy and cookies in fervent gratitude that they were hungry,
rather than full of mischief, no one bothered us except little Moejy,
he of the small ears, the close-set eyes, and the tiny head with
nothing in it.
What Moejy did was a masterpiece of malevolence, even for him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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