Day Trips and Judgement Women

Pop quiz. If I said I went to a bar and grille three times in one day, would you believe me? If you answered ‘no’ you’d be wrong. Thursday was the annual restaurant hop organized by the senior hall and all three courses of our progressive meal took place in businesses with “Bar and Grille” as part of their name. Our senior hall bus holds twenty-five people and it made five trips---on different days---to a tourist town along Lake Michigan. They ought to rename this event “Eat and Shop” because that’s what we do. This year we went to Saugatuck which is one of my favorite places on earth. I’ve written about the town before and I described it as “a town with a history rooted in boat building and lumbering and it’s often called the Art Coast of Michigan because of its 100 year old, 115 acres art colony with ties to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The town is a mecca for people from Chicago who own ‘summer places’ in town or boat over on the weekends, a high energy town with a wintertime population of around 1,000 that swells to 3,000 in the summers.” 

We couldn’t have asked for a better weather day for the restaurant hop and I had the luck of the Irish when a woman I didn’t know well sat next to me and somehow we clicked conversation wise. That doesn’t always happen when you take potluck on the bus. A lot of people sign up with a friend so they’ll have someone to pal around with all afternoon. The bus dropped us off for our appetizer course where I had a salad dressing made with apples, caramel sauce and cranberries over spinach, mixed lettuce and soy nuts. Ohmygod, that was good and I’m not fond of salads. Then we had an hour to shop our way down to the main entrée. I had pre-ordered a hamburger because I hadn’t had one in a long time but I wish I had ordered the fish tacos. 

We had a young waiter who impressed all the ladies at my table with how skillfully he served twenty-five people all at the same time. In fact one of the ladies wanted to tip him extra over the 20% our senior hall pays. But when we got to our dessert course at a different restaurant a woman, who reminded me of a 1950’s librarian with her white hair pulled back into a tight bun and her glasses hanging on a lanyard, complained the entire time while we ate our strawberry shortcakes and brownies about the young waiter at the last restaurant. She said she was going to tell the senior hall director when we got back home to call the entrée restaurant and chew them out for poor service. Her problem, it seems, was she only got a half a cup of coffee before the waiter's pot ran out and it took too long for him to come back with another. I’m starting to dislike old women with ruby red lipstick and tiny lips that they purse in disdain. As I watched those lips moving after a while all I heard was, "I'm old and ornery blah, blah, blah." Two of the ladies at my table also got a half cup of coffee. The waiter had split what was left in the pot between their two cups so neither one had to wait for the fresh pot to brew, he said, and we all thought that was a consider thing to do. Funny how different people can perceive the same set of circumstances differently.

I ended up eating and shopping with my seatmate from the bus. On past trips that’s never happened. She latched on to me after the appetizer course and at first I was annoyed that I wasn’t free to roam the streets with my many memories of Saugatuck to keep me company. Then I thought, what the heck, Jean, it’s probably not healthy to pick the past over the here and now. So I quit thinking about slipping away. By the time our second block of shopping time rolled around she’d spend all the money she wanted---she bought a $45 ring and an $25 art print---and I’m not a shopper by nature so we walked down to the channel, found a bench and watched two tug boats bring a cement pier down the river and an excavating machine on a barge dredging the channel deeper and we talked to the other tourists strolling by on the board walk.

When we got back to the senior hall I said to my seatmate, “I enjoyed spending the afternoon with you” and I meant it. She replied, “I did you too. You’re very easy to talk with.” We had some things in common but she’s a "casino fly" and I have zero interest in casinos so our chance match-up won’t go anywhere in the possible friendship department. Listen to me! I was disgusted by Miss. Ruby Red Lips because I deemed her to be too judgmental and here I am being judgmental about people who love casinos. If I was Catholic I’d be saying some Hail Mary’s about now. (She actually went on an eight day bus tour where all they did is go from casino to casino! I didn't even know tours like that existed.) ©

* The print above is by James Brandess and is of the Kalamazoo River, in the heart of Saugatuck