Mr. Sam is Here

"But nobody ever knew what Mary Poppins felt about it, for Mary Poppins never told anybody anything." – Travers, from Mary Poppins











It was a weight more than simple disbelief from all three of the girls. To endure the mere idea of somebody coming to their house during the day in order to watch over them was certainly disrespectful enough, but a man? Who had ever heard of anything like that before? They all saw within their imaginations pictures of old TV shows where the butler wore a very crisp formal coat and walked around an apartment tidying up the vases and preparing liver and onions over the stove. "There was one reason and one reason only that I invited him to come and meet us today," Mary said, waiting for the girls' eyes to widen even further. "He has done this before." Mary had to think this over herself, for she knew that Sam had actually never done this exactly before but he had taken care of his own three daughters, the oldest of which was now safely along her way to a career in Denver, and two others in college. Paige looked over to Caitlin as though prodding her older daughter to please do something about this quickly. "But he has never been a..." she looked for the right word here, this had become so bizarre as to fully overcome language, "a...nanny...or butler. A banler? I don't know, there is no way that this can work. I already said that I can do this myself. I will work the farm, do the dishes, clean, cook, get Rose ready in the morning. Mother, this is fine, I can do it."
   "Well we will see about all of it in about, one minute. I have invited Mr. Sam over and he should be here any second. I would like to see the three of you wait for just a minute in the other room." Mary pointed in past the kitchen, into the more formal dining area that they rarely used any more. She scanned quickly over the kitchen and was shockingly disgusted that nobody had done their morning dishes and it looked like a small ruined city across the countertops.  A brief glance out the kitchen window and onto the sunny prairie gave her a brief sense of doing the right thing. She pulled her sweater down further over her hips until she heard a double knock. The girls had unwillingly pulled each other into the dining room and stood behind the arch of the doorway stood still as they could hear mother talking briskly to a responding man's voice, "very nice meet you. Mary. There's no way I can tell you how much this means to me that you would consider my services. Here is a card that I have made up myself with all necessary numbers and emails. Please don't hesitate to use them anytime. As we had agreed on, I would have to leave daily by 6:00 so that I could go home and make dinner there as well." Caitlin immediately wondered if this meant that Mr. Sam, as they were calling him now, would be cooking for them a dinner as well. "We had talked before about meals, Sam, please come in. The girls are very excited to see you. They are just in there, waiting."
  "I still think that my greatest mistake I ever made was not going to culinary school. I have been cooking seemingly non stop for the past twenty some years and the most I have to show for it is a thousand recipes bookmarked in my cookbook collection. Here, I actually brought one that I thought we could start with, it is a Mediterranean style. That's what I thought we could begin with." What did he mean start with, the girls wondered. Rose pushed Paiges hand away from her shoulder so that she inch up a bit closer to the doorway. "If the girls are going to learn to cook for themselves, then we will start with small assignments, then work our way up the cutting board, so to speak. Here, I also brought these," he said, and there was long silence. "Well, yes, that will work very nicely."