Taking My Wife to Breakfast

by L. John Ribar

In what is becoming more and more a regular habit, we all went out to breakfast this morning. As usual, trying to get seven people coordinated into ordering is a challenge, one eating lemon skins, another dipping his napkin into his water glass over and over, four or five people talking all at once, all the time. One or two are always grouchy, because they didn't get hot chocolate or they don't like it here, or they didn't know they could get grapefruit juice, or they don't want to get grapefruit juice, they didn't want eggs they wanted pancakes, they don't like pancakes they want waffles, they don't want potatoes they want toast. The oldest son is not deciding what to order, but rather is interrupting the process by thinking aloud about where to distribute Christmas flyers for a local jewelry store today, knowing how fast he can hand them out, but realizing just how many flyers 2000 really is. Now the napkin is soaked, kids are piling their silverware into strange patterns, and three boys are fighting over who gets to sit by mom, repeating their litany of how it's their turn to sit by her, how they love her, and how they never ever get to sit by her. What a nice feeling to know that when all these children are gone, she'll still be my wife.

6S

L. John Ribar, who wrote non-fiction computer books in the 90's, started writing fiction only a year ago. This year he successfully completed ScriptFrenzy, the 3-Day Novel Contest, and Nanowrimo. Now he's settling down for some real writing.