Saturday was interesting.
First, we put together a picnic table that Kindra had ordered online.
The picnic table came from Indonesia, I saw on a label, and was made from a synthetic material that looked like gray barnwood.
I salute Kindra for choosing this material instead of actual tree wood. After watermelon this summer, a couple of wipes with a damp rag and the table should be as clean as a Mousketeer cartoon. No sticky melon juice and no stinging insects trying to eat it. All will be well.
Assembly was easy. The table was in fewer than 10 pieces and the holes were aligned correctly, so in less than an hour it was in the yard, begging to be eaten on.
Kindra decided to christen the new table with standard picnic fare: sandwiches and chips, so she brought the ingredients and summoned the six kids at the house, one of whom was my grandson, Bennett, who will turn four years old in June. These were good-looking sandwiches, like
These were good-looking sandwiches, like ones you might get at a deli. Light bread, turkey, roast beef, lettuce, tomato, a couple of kinds of cheese. She made one for Bennett, who quietly
She made one for Bennett, who quietly watched her assemble it and mumbled something that we took for “nothing” when she asked what did he want, mustard or mayonnaise?
When she crowned his sandwich with the second slide of bread, Bennett... ran as hard he could toward the house.
“That’s weird,” I said.
“Yes,” I agreed. “Perhaps you should check.”
And so I did, and found Bennett sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, partially behind a peace lily.
“Bennett. What’s wrong?”
“I can’t eat this,” he said, pinching a leaf on the peace lily. “What?”
“What?”
“I can’t eat this.” Another pinch of the peace lily leaf.
After maybe a five count, pieces of the puzzle fell together.
My sandwiches are simple affairs: meat, cheese and lots of mustard on bread. I don’t use tomato or lettuce and certainly not onions. I tried pickle relish in 1987, I think it was.
That was his role model for sandwiches during the three-plus years that Bennett and his mother lived at my house.
It seems that his mother inherited my sandwich tendencies, so Bennett’s standard sandwich these days is a slice of cheese between two pieces of white bread. Loves ‘em like that.
So, here was Kindra, his beloved “Grandma,” as he calls her, putting a slice of something red that he must have thought was a watery over-ripe apple on top of his cheese and then adding a big green leaf from a peace lily.
You and I might have called it lettuce, but it was a peace lily leaf to Bennett. A houseplant.
All ended well, though. We peeled off the layers of the sandwich except the cheese and bread and Bennett was a happy camper.
Didn’t finish the sandwich, but ate a lot of it.