Let's Play Hide & Seek

I have spinach in my teeth.  A wad wrapped firmly around my Dracula tooth.  I've been sawing at it like Paul Bunyan for half the evening.  It's going no where.

I give up and go turn on the t.v. (OK...  I try to turn on the t.v.  I don't really know how...) but my tongue keeps going back to that blob.  Have you ever noticed how tongues will do that?  It's like they have a mind of their own; they know when something isn't supposed to be there.  (I think this might be a great scientific study for my tax dollars: Tongues.  What do they know?)
I go back to the bathroom.  I no sooner arrive than I forget why I came in there.  "I must need to pee" I say to no one.  So I pee and go back to my struggle with the remote control.  Before my tush hits the cushions, I remember.  Spinach.
Back to the bathroom-this process repeats itself more times than I care to admit-until I begin to chant "spinach, spinach, spin-ach" down the hall until I reach my destination.
I brush my teeth.  Not budging.  Man, this is some spinach.  I break out a fresh string of floss and go to work.  It moves a bit.  I smile at the mirror.  Still there.  Lovely.  I start making faces-Calvin & Hobbes faces-at the mirror.
"What are you? Six?" says my adult voice.  Then I start laughing at the face staring back at me.  I'm starting to have fun...  I blame this behavior on the fact that I'm a bonus baby.  I'm accustomed to entertaining myself.

A bonus baby is that kid you have when you think you can't have kids anymore--that kid who shows up when your other kids are 9-10-12 years old.  My mother cried when she found out she was pregnant with me-and not tears of joy.  I've got some great bonus baby stories... next time.  Just let me leave these two words for my older friends still within child-bearing years: BIRTH. CONTROL.

When I was little, all I wanted to do was hang out with my siblings.  They were so cool; they got to do so many fun things--without me.  Their friends would come over and they'd play Hide & Seek.  I'd shout "can I play too? Pleeease??"
"Sure" they'd say.  "You go hide and we'll come find you."  Yay!  They let me play too!!
Now, where to hide?  I look around.  Ah, perfect.  A boxwood hedge at the front of the house.  I was small enough that I could crawl up in it like it was a little mini-tree.  They never found me.  Do I need to spell this out for you?  Let me: if you never look for something, you never find it.
They never found me.

But the wasps who had built a nest in the boxwood... they found me.

I remember that evening well.  Sitting on the bathroom vanity, wailing--partly because, jeez, it hurt and partly because my feelings were hurt, while Mama used tweezers to pluck out every last stinger with this "why me" look on her face.  Come to think of it, she had that look a lot.

My gums are bleeding while that tale crosses my mind, digging with all my might at that blasted piece of spinach.  And then it occurs to me....

Tweezers.

Spinach.

Gone.