A dinner and a train

Both Anne and I have had a lot of illness and disability in recent months.  Sometimes both of us were crocked at the same time.  But just lately we seem both to be more or less back to normal so in my pessimistic way I decided to a have a small celebration of our "temporary" return to good health.  Getting from 60 to 70 is so problematical that many people don't survive it so 70+ can not be expected to be a bed of roses.

So I got Anne to come over and cook us one of our favourite foods:  Lamb cutlets.  Lamb cutlets are fiendishly expensive in Brisbane these days but I bought us 16 good ones for the occasion.  We combined that with a good red wine plus fresh bread rolls and real butter -- and I even bought flowers for the table.  Beat that!  Anne contributed a salad with chick-peas in it  -- somewhat to my puzzlement.

It was a great success.  Anne cooked the cutlets just a bit short of well-done and with plenty of salt on them to bring out the flavour it was a great meal.

And for some reason a small episode from long ago popped into my mind.  Children can sometimes upset parents unwittingly and this concerns a small instance of that:

When Joey was about 3, Jenny and I spent some time in Sydney  -- living in a beautiful old Federation house in the Inner West that would now be worth about $2 million, I think.

Once a week we used to  visit Miroma  -- a huge second-hand shop run by the Salvation Army.  And we would always buy Joe a new toy while we were there.  One day we bought him a toy train which he really seemed to like.  Afterwards we went off somewhere else to visit a market.  The market was very crowded and Jenny was wheeling Joey around in his stroller while he was carrying his train.  After a while however Joey started to cry.  Jenny stopped and asked him what was wrong.  "My beautiful train", he replied.  He had dropped his train.  Jenny of course immediately went into reverse to find the train but had no success.  Some other kid had picked it up.

Jenny was however very upset that she had not noticed Joey losing his "beautiful train".  She may have been upset for only a day but it did get to her.  We went and bought him some other train but it was not the same.