Evaporating Cloyce

Awhile back I was out to dinner with an old friend; I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name. As a start, I ordered a Diet Coke and he asked for milk, then he excused himself for a moment.

The waitress came back shortly with a my glass of pop. For Cloyce, she left an empty glass but set two 4 ounce cartons of milk to the side. Cloyce returned and sat down in front of the empty glass. We began chatting.

Not having noticed the two small cartons, Cloyce eventually picked up the empty glass and remarked, "What? Did I order evaporated milk?" 

When I had finished laughing, I pointed to the milk cartons.

Gentle Reminder

Three Sundays ago as me boys and I returned to our hotel after seeing the Red Sox at Fenway Park and then making a literal walk of several historic sights in downtown Boston, we were a bit tired. Well, they were: the old man was ready for another several hours of sightseeing. The night was young! 

Be that as it may, we elected to eat a late dinner at the restaurant in the hotel rather than taking a chance on finding a place somewhere else on a Sunday evening. 

As the pub and grub was open until 10 and we walked in around 8:45, we figured we wouldn't be inconveniencing the staff. Still, we sat at a table for better than ten minutes without attention. We began to whisper between ourselves about perhaps simply grabbing a pizza from the carry out joint we saw a block away. At that point the waiter walked around the bar to approach us.

Or so we thought. He came near but breezed on by, and actually on out the front door. Okay.

A few more minutes of our lives burned off and I finally suggested, maybe a tad louder than necessary, that we ought to just trudge across to Domino's when me son Frank ever-so-gently gave me about the softest elbow to the ribs a guy might get. He saw where I hadn't that the waiter was finally coming up with menus. "Can I get you fellows anything to drink?" he asked, very pleasantly.

So we ordered our dinners and ate, and he was reasonable attentive after that. Yet what I will always remember about the night was the most subtle possible poke in the the ribs a man could ever imaging getting.