The Mast-Head: Let Them Eat Cake

The phone rang from home early Tuesday morning. I was at the office, and Lisa was home getting Ellis, our 5-year-old, ready for school. The subject of breakfast had come up, and Ellis was adamant.

“I don’t want a croissant from Starbucks; I want it from Pierre’s,” he said, prompting Lisa to call me to find out just who was spoiling our child.

“He says you take him to Pierre’s,” she said.

I stammered a response, something about how it had been only three times and that we had been too rushed for breakfast at home. Besides, he had refused the other choices I offered.

“Mary’s?” I had asked, where chocolate croissants run $3.75.

“No. I hate Mary’s,” he said.

“Java Nation?” Croissants cost about $2.50 there.

“No. Pierre’s.”

And so it went.

Ellis goes to school in Bridgehampton and is too young for the bus, so it really wasn’t that much out of the way. Montauk Highway traffic being what it is around 8:30 in the morning, we detoured around Wainscott, then got back on 27 only to get tangled up in the slow crawl past the Bridgehampton School.

There was a parking place right in front of Pierre’s tidy bake shop. I handed the woman behind the counter $5 for the chocolate croissant, leaving my 5 cents change by way of a tip or something.

The things we do for our children. I would never, ever spend that much on a takeout breakfast item for myself. In fact, once Bucket’s in East Hampton closed for good a few years ago, I started bringing lunch from home and keeping it in the Star office fridge. The $10 I might spend on a single sandwich and a drink at a deli might cover noontime groceries for a week. A $5 croissant? No way.

But for the kids, we parents just do it. It is not because we give in to their whining, though that is a factor; Ellis would have been okay if I had said we were going to have Honey Nut Cheerios at home. There’s just something about children and food and holiday gifts and Netflix binges and staying up after their bedtimes and, and, and — and all the other indulgences we give in to without really thinking.

For sure, Lisa called to grill me about Pierre’s, but in the end she headed there herself. Ellis, with his fancy tastes, had the last laugh.