Travels with The Rayman

 

 

Every year we host our Winers and Diners gourmet dinner group over to settle on the next year’s schedule.  Let me back up.  I used to pound my head against the wall trying to figure out how to do the impossible by which I mean devise a dinner rotation while keeping everyone happy with the end product.  This was pure folly.  There are 12 women in our group and the task was impossible.  OH, I kid my women friends…but let’s be frank, 12 women gathered together to agree on anything is surely an impossibility.  !2 men would be, like, whatever.  They don’t give a whit about the whose house they are being dragged to for dinner.  All they require is that we inform them and remind who will be there by listing their names so they won’t forget their names when, alas, they meet again.

Women want to go each other’s homes at least once a year.  And they don’t want to host more than once a year which, given a schedule that included three hostesses every two months made that quite impossible.  And they didn’t mind mentioning it.

Oh, I kid the ladies.  They actually came up with a great idea.  Why not have one dinner party a quarter.  There are four quarter in a year.  Four times three hostesses equals twelve.  Bingo.  Everyone hosts just once.  One problem solved.  The other problem was delegated to chance.  When everyone showed up this year, I asked which quarter they wanted.  Three volunteers for first quarter were secured.  Etc. for the other quarters.  Then we drew names for the participants for each hostess.  Who could possibly object?  Problem solved.

But I digress.

When we get together each year as a full group, everyone brings an appetizer and a bottle of wine.  Instant party.  And then everyone digs in and helps themselves to whatever wine and food they wish.  Oh, so egalitarian.  And so it went this year.  Some of us stand, some of us sit.  We sit on chairs, ottomans, the couch and of course, and at the dining table.  To make room for all the food on the kitchen island, Wanda, our pet beta fish, we moved to the center of the dining room table and it was there that someone noticed she wasn’t moving.  And she had changed color.  And, OMG.  She was dead.

Yes, our fish called Wanda, succumbed at our annual party.  So, the Rayman gathered up her bowl, “fished” her our of the water and threw her down the garbage disposal.  What ever happened to the toilet?  No.  Wanda got the garbage disposal.  I don’t know.  It didn’t seem right.  But looking at it logically, all types of dead things meet their fate in the garbage disposal.  So, I guess Wanda really wasn’t any different from a purely logical point of view.  But wrap a few emotions around it, “My fish, Wanda, is dead?  She was the perfect pet.  And we had her for three years.”, and the garbage disposal solution seems, well, a bit heartless.

So, all my dear friends as well as those readers I don’t know, here’s to Wanda.  Put on your favorite dirge and drink a toast to Wanda.