Pass it On

It's been a while since I've eaten lunch in an elementary school cafeteria.  My daughter asked me to come in and have lunch with her since it was her birthday.  What an adventure that was!

We're talking lunch with a bunch of fourth graders.  The boys at the table behind me were doing typical boy things, like mixing the strangest combinatons of food to freak the girls out who were sitting at my table.  We even had some boys impressing us with their acrobatic abilities - doing backbends from their chairs to the floor.

Of course, there was food that somehow managed to find its way onto the floor.  What a mess!

But the real fun began when my daughter decided to start a game of  "pass it on."  One person says something and it circulates around the table until it gets back to the person who started it.  Well, in my version of the game, that's how it goes.  Not in this version.  In this version, one person says something, but before it can get all the way back to the originator, someone else says something from the other direction and passes it on.  It's like a total collision.

"Wait a minute," I said.  "What's going on here?  This isn't how we play the game."

"Yeah it is,"  a perky young lady said.  "It goes on forever like this."

Around and around it went, for twenty minutes, until it was time for the lunch to be over.

Meanwhile, at the boy table, a particularly slobbish young man was painting his face with mashed potatoes and BBQ sauce.   

Oy gewalt.  Right now I'm thanking my lucky stars that I don't have to eat with these people on a daily basis!