With age comes patience

During basic when you sit down to eat you have between 5 and 10 minutes to eat and dispose of you tray and get out. Now, you have not lived untill you have had a pancake with bacon and oatmeal all crammed together and stuffed into your mouth for breakfast. Lets not forget the fun of dinner. There's a lot of combinations to pile together. Now, I can't say the food was bad, it went down to quick to taste it. I do know that as the weeks went on, you learned real quick how to put things together and eat fast in order to consume the most in the least amount of time. I don't know about war, but I do know we would win an eating contest.... One night towards the end of Basic, we had the opportunity to have cake. Since I was the Platoon Sgt, I was always last to eat; therefore, last to have the chance for any dessert. Well, tonight I managed to get one very small piece (a bite) of cake with possibly a spoon full of icing. May have been small but I was excited to get anything. I sat down across from a good friend who was eating already. When she saw my cake she reached across and took some of the icing off my plate. I, of course, looked at her and whispered 'quit that, (blip,blip). You are going to get us into trouble'. Keep in mind this was in humor, but still it was my very small piece of cake.... Everyone around us was trying not to laugh for fear of getting in trouble, but they were having difficulty themselves. She reched across again and took the last piece of the cake I had. Man, at this point I wanted to kill her. She is smiling, I am smiling only to say, "I am going to get you back." She smiled again and cotinued to stuff her mouth with her food, everyone around us was giggling. Now, you think, a piece of cake is not much, but to us it was like finding lost treasure. You cherished any you got. Oh, there is something, I forgot to mention. When you get your tray, you were only allowed one drink glass with it. Of course, as fate had it, I had already finished mine. So, I sat there, patiently watching her stuff her mouth and smile at me for her victory over my cake. (A great thing that comes with age is patience....) Just as she was about to grab her full glass of juice to wash down my dry cake and her cheeks for of food, I gracefully and with swiffness grab it. Smiled at her with a gleam in my eyes, and then proceeded to drink every drop without coming up for air. The look on her face was, as the VISA commercial would state "priceless". And atleast that night, a few of the girls could go to sleep with a smile on their face from finding some sense of humor in that day.
Hope you enjoyed...I still, to this day, cherish that memory.