We invited our pastor and his wife and another couple from our church over for dinner tonight.  Then two days ago my neck started hurting. I’ve gone two nights with virtually no sleep because my neck hurts no matter which way I sleep - on my side, on my back - whatever. It hurts when I chew, and it hurts when I bend over. It sounds silly to say that my neck hurts when I ben over, but I finally figured out that when you bend over, you have to extend your neck somewhat.  And my neck hurts when I do anything that moves it in any way.  No fever.  No swelling.  Just a very, very sore right side of my neck.

I had already planned the menu and bought all the ingredients for our dinner party tonight.  I was going to make lasagna rollups salad, fresh fruit, iced tea - along with individual chocolate souffles for dessert.  I was excited about the evening. I planned to straighten up the house this morning and do the cooking this afternoon.

However,this morning, after spending another sleepless and painful night, and realizing that my neck was worse - not better, I knew there was no way I could do any significant cleaning or cooking today and I sure couldn’t enjoy having company. I just hurt too much. So I asked RT to call both couples and tell them that we would have to cancel the dinner party and that we’d reschedule sometime in a week or two.

He said he would call both couples. Later in the morning, he called to say he’d talked with our minister but that he needed the other couple’s phone number. I gave him the phone number and he promised he’d call them right then. Several more hours passed. Around 4:00 this afternoon (we had invited them for around 5:00), I started getting antsy and worrying about whether or not RT had remembered to call the second couple. So I called him again to confirm that he had indeed talked with them. He had.  He assured me that he had taken care of everything.

Fast forward to about 15 minutes ago. Suddenly Jake started barking. I’m not psychic, but I knew immediately who he was barking at. I peeked out one of the windows, and sure enough, there was the second couple. The husband has been very ill this past year, and he was very laboriously and painstakingly making his way across the driveway with his cane. I knew I had to get out there before he started climbing the steps.   So I hurried outside to talk to them.

So how do you tell someone that yes, we invited you to dinner, but now we are univiting you and we want you to go home instead? I didn’t have time to think about what to say. I just explained the situation, apologized and said that Ron had said he’d talked to them. The wife looked puzzled. She hadn’t received any calls. The husband said, “Oh, I thought that was Ralph.” He went on to explain that when he’d received the phone call he thought he’d been talking to a neighbor, Ralph, who called to tell him that he had a crick in his neck. The wife explained that with the husband’s difficulty with hearing, she usually handled all the phone calls but that she’d been out for awhile earlier in the day and that’s when Ron had called them.

I invited them in to come in and visit for awhile anyway. They declined. They had brought me some flowers and insisted that I keep them. They were very nice, and I know they had no hard feelings or anything about the situation, but still . . . I felt terrible.

So, what would YOU have done in that situation?

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 5:40 pm and is filed under That's My Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.