Dinner

     Tonight we went to dinner with a friend of a friend who was new in town.
     Clara was not in top form.
     We went swimming this morning and Clara experimented with putting her head under the water, again and again.  This afternoon, after the third saturated diaper, I surmised that she had been gulping the pool water rather than holding her breath.  The wet diapers, coupled with the heat of her bedroom (insufficient ducts, apparently), kept her from napping sufficiently.
      She was also very, very hungry but the time we sat down to eat.  We initially stopped by Deli Days at the synagogue where Simon and I were married, but they were just closing shop.  So instead we drove all the way back downtown to eat at a middle-eastern grill there.
     Clara refused to sit in her high chair.  She preferred my lap.  She started fingering the beads on my necklace, examining each one thoroughly and then biting it, like a miner testing for gold.  She wanted to stand on a table at the back of the restaurant and look at her reflection in the mirror hanging on the wall there.  She rifled through the Sweet n' Low and swiped the salt and pepper shakers, objecting strenuously when I took them back.
     Somehow she filched a pen with a spoon attached to it from the cash register.  I was enjoying my chicken kabob and the dinner conversation when our dinner date abruptly stopped talking.  Clara was stirring my water with the spoon pen.  I took it away and she started dipping her French fries in my glass.
     She examined a dolma curiously and then squeezed it, as though it were a giant slug.  She ate my rice with her hands.  She got a piece stuck in her windpipe and coughed gratuitously, spewing middle-eastern cuisine all over the table.  She escaped and ran, screeching, up and down the length of the restaurant.  
     When we stood to leave, prematurely (the high-jinks had reached an unsupportable level), I had rice down my dress and tabouli in one of my shoes.
     On our way out to the car, Simon said, "We definitely need to work on our manners."