Paying my own way?

     Sometimes you experience milestones that only reveal themselves to you long after, when you sit and remember in the light of subsequent events. Some announce themselves with stereotypical fear and trembling. Some, like this weekend, slip up on you quietly with half-formed thoughts until you come to with a start and realize something....different...just happened.

    Lest I confound even more by mystery, I'll just go ahead and say Andrew picked up the check while we were out at dinner.

   

   Now, this is not a reflection on Andrew's generosity, mind you, he has always been very generous, maybe even the most generous of my kids. No, instead it is a reflection of role reversal, that in this case the typical dynamic of father and son flipped.

    Friday night we were on our own, Sarah and Andrew and I, because Stacey had headed out a couple of days before, the station wagon packed with spinning wheels, for a Spin-In or somesuch in Florida. Andrew and Sarah decided that nothing would be better for Friday night entertainment than to go out to Steak 'n Shake after Andrew got in from work, after his restaurant shift. Although my days of late nights are mostly behind me, when your 16- and 21-year old invite you to hang out at Steak 'n Shake on Friday night at midnight, you go! (Don't know how I stayed up that late-would it be cheating if I snuck in a nap earlier?)

     So that's how I found myself still up past the late news, eating sliders and drinking stickily sweet cherry Coke, last Friday night. I'm pretty sure I didn't yawn obtrusively more than once or maybe a dozen times, even. So we ate and talked and argued and conversed and laughed and joked, shedding the cabin fever of a snow day from school and work earlier in the day.

    Then the waitress dropped the check on the table, and Andrew retrieved it. I pulled my wallet out, and he told me "Dad, I've got this." 

     Maybe he has paid for something before, perhaps I have forgotten other instances, but  that's the way it goes with memory sometimes. Maybe a coffee at Starbucks or a taco at a truck or a burger for lunch. This was different, being more or less a family meal with me AND his sister on the tab. The type of dinner that an adult pays for, not just kids spotting each other lunch.

     Maybe it is a little...different...to have your children pay your way, to reverse the roles to become the provider. I certainly have no objection, and it doesn't diminish me in any way, but it somehow feels-well, momentous. I have a tendency to see pattern and metaphor in everything that happens to me.

     So here I am, beginning with a hamburger and ending with thoughts on the eternal rolling of one generation to the next. 

      I guess this means I better make sure I pick up my mom's tab next time I go out with her.