Trip, 7 years old
Every Easter morning, at the crack of dawn, our children would jump out of bed and rush downstairs to see if the Easter Bunny had come during the night. Yes, again he had been there. An Easter egg or jelly bean was hidden in every nook and cranny of our living room.
I always got up extra early to make sure that the younger children started collecting the candy first so that the hunt was fair for the littlest ones. After breakfast, at 7 am, they were allowed to eat their candy. Only on Halloween and Easter were they permitted to have all they wanted. The children would happily sort their jelly beans into different colored piles, swapping one color for another, and counting how many of their favorites they had. While they did this, they ate jelly bean after jelly bean.
Later that morning, we would dress up in our Sunday best clothes and drive to the ten o’clock service at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church where we would meet Mummy and Daddy. I was always proud of how nice the children looked and how well they always behaved during church services. We all sat together as a family filling an entire pew, about half way down the isle on the right side.
One especially memorable Easter in 1962, about thirty minutes into the service, seven-year-old Trip, started to fidget. I asked him to sit still. He replied that he didn’t feel well. Then I told him, if he really were going to be sick, to go to the bathroom. He settled down and appeared to be fine.
Just as Mr. Gannon, our priest, started the sermon, Trip jumped up and ran down the right aisle toward the door to the parish hall at the front of the church. To get to this door he had to go to the far left corner, crossing directly in front of the altar. When he reached the pulpit from which Mr. Gannon was speaking, Trip stopped.
Right there, in front of the entire congregation, he threw up and threw up and threw up! There were jelly beans everywhere. There were red ones and yellow ones and green ones and orange ones. Some were slightly digested, gooey blobs, but most were whole. How could he have eaten so many! The service stopped while several men tried to clean up the candy with mops and buckets of water. This did not work! All the jelly beans just rolled everywhere when they were pushed with the mops. They finally used a dustpan and brush. Trip had recovered long before the jelly beans were cleaned up and the service was resumed.
This was, indeed, a memorable Easter!
What a hoot!
When my grandson, Ben, was between the ages of 2-8 he happily ate all kinds of food like any normal kid does, but VERY often threw it all up about 10 minutes later (He finally grew out of this ). One day I took Ben and his brother, Peter, out to dinner after they had been to a Birthday party. They were arguing about what color the frosting was on the Birthday cake. Minutes later, Ben threw up all OVER the table, floor, nearby diners at the restaurant. Earlier , Peter had insisted that the frosting was green. Ben said it was blue, he was SURE it was blue. The vomit all over the floor was TOTALLY green and Peter, age 7, remarked…”I TOLD you the frosting was green, not blue.” Fortunately, no jelly beans rolling in the aisles !
It is interesting that, as the dubious star of the story, Trip is the one who has been enthusiastic about you publishing it.