THEY CALL ME...THE DRIBBLER

No, this isn't a post about basketball.

In order to write anything intelligent about basketball one would have to know something about basketball.

And I don't.

I know that my daughter plays center. Well, until she went to the high school basketball camp (she's an incoming freshman) and they put her in as a guard the whole week.

And, um...well, I don't know for sure what that means. But I know I like to watch basketball, especially when one of my children is playing. Or when our high school team was playing the year they won the state championship during the same school year we had won the FOOTBALL state championship. I mean how cool is that?

But anyway, this post isn't about basketball.

It's about my eating style.

Or my lack of style while eating.

I have tried all of my adult life to conduct myself with some small sense of decorum. I try to be a "put together" woman. I try to dress neatly and wear appropriate makeup. I think I have a pretty good hairstyle going on. I try to be poised and friendly and let people know they matter to me when I speak to them. I try to behave in a way that will not embarrass myself or my family.

All that is well and good, but...

I do not know how to eat an ice cream cone.

Nor do I know how to eat a sandwich without making a mess.

At least I can't seem to do either of the above two (quite enjoyable) things without making a mess and, usually, dribbling on my shirt. You know? Like a three-year-old.

I am a constant source of dining entertainment for my husband.

It all started the summer after my freshman year in college. Both Paul and I had stayed in Arkansas to take college classes and to work, and every evening we'd go to Baskin-Robbins. Yes, EVERY EVENING.

Ladies, if you want your freshman fifteen to turn into the freshman twenty, go to Baskin-Robbins every night. What was I thinking?

Anyway, we'd get our ice cream treat and sit at one of those cute little ice cream parlor tables and dive into our Heaven on a cone, while talking about our day. And always, without fail, I'd be in the middle of a sentence or the middle of licking my scoop when I'd suddenly stop, look at Paul with dread in my eyes, then look downward at my shirt and see the splotch of ice-cream (usually chocolate) that had just landed there.

And Paul would throw his head back and laugh hysterically.

Can you believe that's the summer he proposed to me?

Can you believe my ice-cream-eating abilities haven't improved since that summer 22 years ago?

And things aren't much better when I eat a sandwich.
By the way, I'm talking about big restaurant sandwiches here, not the kind I make in my own kitchen. I can usually be trusted to eat bologna and cheese like a grown-up.

I don't dribble sandwiches so much as I just seem to completely annihilate them while I'm eating them. It's the strangest thing. I will be halfway done with my sandwich, say a nice big cheeseburger, and the bottom bun will be the size of, well, half a bun, as you would expect. The top bun, however, will be the size of a quarter.

I know.

Nobody could recreate that if they tried, yet I do it every time I eat a burger.

I have learned that once I pick up my burger and begin eating, I CANNOT, FOR ANY REASON PUT IT DOWN, or it will all fall apart because of the havoc I have wreaked upon it. The times when I can't finish my sandwich, which is almost always when we're at a restaurant, I'll hand it to Paul so he can polish it off, and he just looks at it with wonderment and says "How do you DO this?"

It's a gift, honey. It's a gift.