Betty Laverne’s Birthday Lunch
Old folks logistics requires advanced planning to ensure you’ve got Robert or Willy, the caregivers, and the ArcGar van, to get from Point A to Point B, in this case The Red Lobster, for Betty Laverne’s Birthday Lunch. Robert gathered the ladies and their wheelchairs and deposited them into the van. My dad and his walker rode with me. “I’ve been to The Red Lobster three or four times before,” he recalled. And a steakhouse, and the Japanese place, Tokyo Wako. We mourned the loss of Souplantation, casualty of recent events.
Seafood restaurants remind my dad of the waitress who described the various specials as “this one’s fishy, this one’s less fishy.” We always get a kick out of that. My dad’s not a lobster fan, so he was leaning towards the chicken tenders. I suggested the filet mignon for this special occasion, and we went back and forth several times before I ordered him the filet. Everyone else had some form of lobster. Cat and Augustine, friends of the family, were nearby, so Penny invited them down. My dad challenged Augustine to “break my hand,” a decades old tradition meant to give him an opportunity to break yours (including the surgeon slated to repair my mom’s broken hip about four years ago).
We shot photos. My dad asked to see the one he made of Betty, my mom, Penny, and I. I told him it was in the middle of a whole bunch of other photos, but then I tracked it down to show him at least once. He asked Augustine if he’d ever been to the Grand Canyon, suggesting it as the location for our next birthday party. We hiked from the South Rim to the North in a day when I was sixteen. My dad and his buddies Jim Fuller and Allyn Rifkin from the city. Just to say we did it, I suppose. Jim Fuller blew out his knee, thwarting my dad’s original plan to repeat the death march in reverse. That was the year I got my license and the summer Elvis died. I wasn’t supposed to be on the freeway when I heard the news over the radio. Pretty sure the radio died soon after Elvis, and the window crank. But the car lived on to carry me through several years of precarious situations.
A guy with a van was heading back to the South Rim the next day, and he agreed to take us. Neither he nor us nor anyone else got murdered and dumped amongst the cacti. The next thing I remember is heading back to California through the Arizona desert, thunder and lightning and buckets of rain, my white knuckles gripping the wheel, too scared to speak, too proud to give up the pilot’s seat.
There’s a song that goes “Who’ll Buy My Flowers” that my dad insists was sung by Lauren Bacall. Cat tracked it down and played it. “You used to sing us ‘Oh what a beautiful morning’ when I was a kid.” My mom starts to sing it and remembers more than I expected her to. Everything is new when you’re old. Except for “Who’ll Buy My Flowers,” and the house on Ti Feng Road, and the Japanese bombers flying over Shanghai. I order chocolate cake for my dad, with vanilla ice cream, and my mom wanted some, too. Till it showed up. Leftovers for somebody else.
Robert showed up at the appointed hour to return the old folks to the hotel. Our first non-medical outing since the good ol’ days. Happy Birthday, Betty Laverne!