I'll try to be discrete here. A member of my family--a junior member--a
girl, let's say--is a picky eater. When I say picky I mean aside from
junk food there are only three items you can find in a grocery store
that she will eat. Yes, it's a pain, and I would complain about it in
the strongest terms, but then my mother would remind everyone that for
two full years I lived on nothing but Honeycomb cereal and cranberry
juice. And I wasn't faking it. Short of child abuse there was nothing
my parents could have done to force an expansion of my diet.

That happened on its own in my mid-teens and now I eat everything, with
two notable exceptions. I don't eat seafood, because I literally can't
smell the difference between fresh cod and the dumpster behind Anthony's
Pier 4, crustaceans are basically giant underwater insects, and mollusks
are self-explanatory. The other thing I don't eat is dried coconut,
because I'm against foods you can never fully swallow. You can wash down
a Mounds bar with a quart of cranberry juice and I guarantee you'll still
be chewing coconut an hour later. Even a Waterpik is powerless against it.

One of the three items my daughter will eat is Gerber pears, which
is fortunate, because it's the only thing standing between her and
a complete lower GI shutdown. A few days without the pears and we're
looking at a twelve hour ordeal negotiating the release of the hostages,
as we say. Typical vacation food, whose roughage content is so low it
actually sucks fiber from your stomach lining, makes the pears that
much more crucial. So when a heavily armed man at the Capitol building
in Washington DC ordered me to drop the pears or face the consequences,
you can understand why I hesitated.

As I recounted in Part 2 of this story, choosing the pears over a tour
of the Capitol Building meant I got separated from my family for several
hours. Ordinarily this would be a boon, but there's something about
getting left behind in an unfamiliar city that can make a grown man feel
like a kid lost at Six Flags. A cast member walked by who looked exactly
like Christopher Dodd, and I considered asking him to help me find my
family, because if there was no hope I knew he'd tell it to me straight,
with no flimflammery, no dealing from the bottom of the deck. But instead
I decided to attempt the impossible and call my wife on her cell phone.

If you've ever tried to reach my wife on her cell phone you know how
desperate the situation had become. This is a phone that is never
charged, let alone on, yet still somehow costs 40 bucks a month. She's
more likely to use it as a projectile weapon against an attacker than as
a communication device. But it was my last hope, so I ran down Capitol
Hill and across Maryland Ave to the Botanical Gardens, which supposedly
housed the closest public phone along with the world's largest collection
of Eurasian Ghost Orchids or pumpkins or some such garbage.

Every minute I spent away from the Capitol Building was a minute in which
my family might emerge, glance around halfheartedly and decide to move to
California without me. So placing the futile call and returning quickly
to the scene was top priority. What I hadn't banked on was the jungle
labyrinth design of the building and the number of idiots fascinated
by ferns. I was climbing over children, trampling rare and endangered
ficus plants, endangering not-so-rare old matrons from every garden club
in the country... Eventually I made it to the phone, left a message for
my wife, slashed and burned my way back to the entrance and ran up the
hill to find her waiting for me near the Capitol steps.

As you would expect we had a happy reunion, assigned blame for the
mishap, and then Emily threw up on a tour bus. Actually she threw up
on me, the bus, and everyone else unlucky enough to be touring in the
vicinity that day.

She had told me several times that she was going to throw up, but
I ignored her. You have to understand that Emily is always
warning she's about to throw up, and only delivers the goods about once a
year. She's like a dormant volcano that rumbles harmlessly for decades,
so you build your mud hut on the mountainside and refuse to evacuate
every time you see a little smoke. You tell everyone it's all part of
the Mount Emily lifestyle. Then you find yourself in a taxi with chunks
of pasta in your ear and all the windows rolled down.

When we spilled out of the cab in front of our hotel I tipped the driver
five dollars. Where I come from that means you're eternally grateful,
but I'm not sure it helped. The windows stayed down as he sped off toward
the Potomac River.

John Lengyel lives in Cohasset, where you may notice there are no Gerber
pears left in stores on Tuesday afternoons.