...And They Don't Take American Express

Dear Laney,

According to Granny Jack, when I was about your age, my favorite thing to play was “Restaurant.” I’d get out a little pad of paper and a pen and try to take her dinner order. Typically, she would order a steak, and I would tell her, “We don’t have that.” “But Brooke,” she’d reason, “If we’re pretending, why can’t I have a steak?” “We don’t have that,” I’d insist. “But if we use our imagina-” “We don’t have that.”

In retrospect, she was a problem customer, and she’s lucky I didn’t call security on my toy phone and have her removed from the establishment.

With my history of being a feisty fake waitress (and later, in college, a feisty real waitress), I totally had it coming to me yesterday when you walked behind a little wall at the playground and asked, “So whaddya have, Mommy?”


- I’d like macaroni and cheese.
- We don’t have mac o’ cheese
- How about pizza?
- No, we don’t have that.
- Okay... How about spaghetti?
- No pasketti. 
- Well, what do you have?
- Ice cream chocolate and ice cream banilla. 
- Fine. I’ll have a chocolate ice cream.
- (Handing me a handful of wood chips) 
- Here ya go, Mommy.
- What do I owe you?
- Ummm... forty-two dollars.
- I just have a fifty. Can I get some change?
- We don’t have change.

I mean, I may have verbally abused my customers and denied them service, but I never gouged them. But I guess it's like they say: every new generation improves on the last.

Order up-
Mom