J. Lennon Didn't Write This One

Imagine, if you will, a woman who shows up early to reserve seats for select colleagues at the workplace district-wide back-to-school kickoff breakfast. She turns three times like a dog going down for a nap. Selects a table with a good view of the PowerPoint presentation, close to the buffet but not next to it, with ample room for feeders to amble by without dumping orange juice on her head. Yes. The perfect perch from which to enjoy one's very last first meeting.

She selects a seat at the end for herself, and places on the table, respectively, a sheaf of note-taking paper, her water bottle, and her work keys on the stretchy neon green coiled bracelet, to reserve places for her cronies. Who arrive five minutes before the event begins. No harm. No foul. They're her cronies, by cracky!

As the festivities get underway, people unable to tell time, folks with a grand-entrance complex, and renegades suffering from don't-give-an-eff-itis trickle into the venue. Expecting to find seats with THEIR cronies. Who have not saved them seats. But offer to get up and get them seats. Seats from the next table with territory clearly marked, and savers to snarl and slap the hand of the would-be taker off the would-be-taken seat. Let the record show that this was not the imagined-woman's table.

Some latecomers perch, one cheek on, one cheek off, upon a chair with another's one-cheek. But the sharers soon tire of living la vida fifth grade, and hike off to harvest a hard chair from the teacher workroom. And place it in the aisle, at the end of the table, for the laties. Not one chair. But two. Directly across in the aisle next to the imagined-woman.

This arrangement irks the imagined-woman. Not only does the unfairness of the situation get under her thin papery elderly soon-to-be-retired skin, but the rabble-rousers keep her from hearing pertinent information from the speakers. What if she forgets how to be confidential? What if she forgets that she is a mandated reporter? What if she can't bask in the glory of her department that earned all category points in the something-or-other state rating score?

But wait. The imagined woman has no idea of the terrible fate yet to come. She stacks a plate to the rafters with rib-sticking breakfast food, as part of the select group that by chance or by cheat (from taking notes on the order of feeding for last year's tables) picked the right place to sit, so as to be first in the food line. She sits down at her table, the seat on the aisle end, unencumbered, and digs in.

What's this? The imagined woman feels like porcelain Little Miss Puffytail in the Quilted Northern commercial. She can never forget. No, she can never forget the sight of various sets of buttocks. Buttocks passing over her plate piled high with cantaloupe, watermelon, scrambled eggs, bacon, link sausage, biscuit, gravy, hash browns, and a mini blueberry muffin. Buttocks belonging to colleagues who must shuffle sideways past the laties who breakfast at the end of the table with their added seats blocking the aisle.

Imagine, if you will, a woman with buttocks on her mind and on her plate at The Last Breakfast.