Chef’s salad. They ordered chef’s salad on individual plates, each one individualized, each garnished according to their personal tastes. All I had to do was make them.

I washed the lettuce carefully, I’d like to stress that at the outset. It was fresh lettuce, and I washed it leaf by leaf. Then I tore the leaves and put them in a large dish. Then everything else got washed and peeled and boiled (the eggs) and so on, and the salads were made and served.

They weren’t bad. Olive oil and vinegar dressing, because we were out of everything else. No cheese for Gamma, because she dislikes most forms of cheese.

“Ew, there’s a bug on my salad,” she said.

“Nonsense,” one of her parents said. I forget which one. Ultimately, both.

“You’re sitting there until you finish that salad,” we said.

“It’s just an herb,” one of us said.

And, “that’s all you’re getting.”

And so on.

Then her older sister Beta stabbed us in the back. “There really is a bug,” she said, holding up a piece of her own lettuce.

The ice was then broken, and we all began discovering medium-sized greenish bugs on our lettuce. Everywhere. I’ve never seen that many bugs on lettuce.

Once, on a Tarom (Romanian airlines) flight from Vienna to New York, a large centipede raced out of my salad, headed who knows where. But never had I seen this many bugs.

My wife and daughters set down their forks. Tears of, I guess, relief ran down Gamma’s cheeks.

“The tomatoes, though,” I said. “The tomatoes are fine.” I ate one demonstratively. “Eggs, carrots, cheese, ham. All fine.”

Herbs, indeed. Obugano, for example.

I took Gamma shopping for fireworks afterwards.