His Dogness

When I first met Sparkle Girl, she took miniscule bites. If one of her American Girl dolls had come to life, it wouldn’t have taken bites any smaller.

And it was easy for Sparkle Girl to become distracted when she was in the middle of a meal. Some conversational topic would capture her imagination, and, forgetting her food completely, she would wander off in whatever direction her mind was taking her.

When it became clear that she wasn’t going to return to her meal anytime soon on her own, we would remind her that she was in the middle of supper.

Also, it could be hard to tell when she was done because, if given the opportunity, she would have ladled out about twice as much food onto her plate as she could possibly eat. It was as if she liked having spare food just in case. The first couple of times that you asked whether she was done, she would say, “Oh, no,” and eat another teeny-tiny bite or two.

One way or another, I had plenty of opportunity to ask myself such questions as, “If it’s going to take this long to eat supper every night for years to come, are you going to be OK?” I never was able to say, “Yes,” with any confidence.

Besides, all these ways of approaching a meal were alien to me.

I might forget what I’m saying while I’m eating but I would never forget that I was eating while I was talking. (More than once, Garnet has suggested that I complete a bite before completing my thought.)

I grew up in a family where the rule was that you ate whatever you put on your plate. And, with five children in the family, if you didn’t act quickly, everything was gone before you had all that you wanted.

When we lived in West Virginia, my friends Artie’s mother would bake cookies and leave a plate of them out on the counter. As we walked through the kitchen, Artie might take one and I could do the same. It was all that I could do not to stuff a couple in my pockets before taking a final two so that I would have one in each hand to wolf down right then.

I need not have worried Sparkle Girl’s bird bites. She soon started taking Sparkle Girl-size bites. She still likes to load extra food on her plate but reminding her that she’s welcome to take as much as she wants as long as eats whatever she takes curbs most excesses.

And, as for total amount consumed, she has become an eating machine. After she suffered an emotional reversal recently, Garnet and I told her that we would take her and Doobins to her favorite restaurant for breakfast and that she could order whatever she wanted. She could even order two drinks if she wanted to. (She sometimes has trouble deciding between iced tea and Sprite.)

Once there, she ordered pancakes, bacon and grits and was on her way to ordering a side of biscuits and hash browns until Garnet and I told her that she was welcome to share our biscuits and hash browns. And, if that proved not to be enough, we could order more.

I thought that I would at least be finishing up the remains of the pancakes. I was, oh, so wrong. As soon as breakfast arrived, Sparkle Girl added a biscuit from Garnet’s plate and some hash browns from mine to her pile. Then she was off to the races.

Where she put all that food, I will never know.

A few weeks later, Sparkle Girl and I were out and about early one morning when she announced that she needed breakfast and she needed it now. We stopped off at a K&W. She had never been to one for breakfast and marveled at having so many possibilities right before her eyes. Her tray and mine were both filled to capacity with her choices while we still had almost half the line to go.

She would have been happy go back for a third tray and keep ordering but, at that point, I pulled out the “if this isn’t enough, we will come back for more” ploy.

As she worked her way through her waffle, bacon, grits, etc., she talked about attractive combinations for future breakfasts there.

Her body is certainly putting all that food to good use. When I come over after walking His Dogness after work some evenings, she looks distinctly taller than the day before.

At about 5 p.m. on a recent Saturday, we were eating what Garnet and I thought of as an early dinner. When I said something about dinner, Sparkle Girl said, “Dinner?”

I wasn’t sure what she was up to. Did she think of it more as supper than dinner? So I asked whether that was what she meant.

“Supper?” she said. “This is lunch.”

I reminded her that we had indeed eaten around lunchtime. Admittedly, it was informal. We had pulled things out of the refrigerator and cupboard, and everyone had eaten whatever caught his or her fancy. Certainly, I was full when we were done.

Oh, no, she said, that wasn’t lunch; that was a snack. So what we were eating at 5 had to be lunch, and we were going to owe her supper later.

For many years, my grandfather owned a grocery store in Concord. After he retired, he set up shelves in the basement and continued to buy things wholesale. When my grandmother needed something, she would just send one of us grandkids down into the basement. Along with Campbell’s soup and other national brands, the shelves also had garden-grown vegetables that had been canned in Mason jars.

You would walk along the aisles until you came whatever Nannie needed, grap it and take it back upstairs.

The day may come when we need to do something such as that in Garnet’s basement.