Cracked me up that only one reader—some anonymous, complete stranger from Cranston!—had big enough cojones to write their comment about my floral dilemma on yesterday’s blog page rather than email it to me! As it turned out, people’s opinions were almost evenly divided between “screw her” and “awww, be nice.”
At the risk of sounding like Randy Cohen, author of the New York Times’ “The Ethicist” column, I ended up doing the right thing, only because I knew the sender of the flowers. Had they been from some random person, I would have had those peonies on my counter faster than it would take Speidi to accept yet another fame whore op. But my conscience said it wasn’t nice to Donna and Bob, since I knew (and liked) them. And David saw personal opportunity in being a good doobie—maybe a comped rabbit dinner next time we go to Paci!
So while the most selfless thing would’ve been to deliver the flowers and not report our kind deed to Donna and Bob, we did the next best thing. Since the gate was open at Casa Her Majesty (which it almost never is—perhaps she was expecting that the Greater World would want to shower Her Majesty with get-well gestures?) we pulled in and put the flowers on the doorstep, where they had been left at our house. And then, we “rationalized” that we simply must call Paci and be good citizens by updating Her Majesty’s address with them for their future reference. Right. And to let them know how lucky they were that we had swung by because otherwise they might’ve sat there for days. And that we don’t know Her Majesty personally, but it would be our greatest pleasure to reroute the lovely flowers. Plus we just had to know where they had gotten such a delightful arrangement. Turns out we missed Donna and Bob by ten minutes at the restaurant, but the bookkeeper took down the whole story to let them know. (And the flowers were from the little place in Southport by the horseshoe.)
Yes. I’m a good doobie. A flowerless doobie, but a good doobie nonetheless!